Picture a baby shower.

“This one’s kind of a dud,” he said, turning the page. “It’s fine, but I’m not sure where it goes.”
“That’s like me on this path,” she said.
“It’s really not.”

I should tell you I used to be in an imaginary band...

I mistook a plastic bag...

In a long baseball season, there’s always the question of whether any one game matters

Read Kevin Mahler's Introduction to his ongoing 5-part "Portrait Series Paralleling Characters in HBO’s Deadwood with Contemporaneous Pop Country Musicians," and check out previous parts 1 and 2 and 3

Tom Cruise is one of life’s winners. He felt the need, the need for speed, and singlehandedly saved America from those Soviet planes, or something—honestly you never understood what was going on in the second half of Top Gun. In A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson told Tom Cruise he couldn’t handle the truth, but Jack Nicholson was quite wrong.

Horace Guy Womack was in the employ of four different Major League teams across five seasons, a serviceable bullpen righty who lost as many games as he won, but managed to keep his lifetime ERA a

The best wrestler he'd ever seen.

I will take an infestation, but only if it won’t spread.

"American Royals" and "Jenny"

Kathy doesn’t know the band but she wants to know me more. 

Like many youngsters of the era, this author lived in fear that these bees would descend upon his town by the thousands and sting everyone to death. 

I wandered around Sam Goody, more likely keeping track of my ABCs than taking inventory of the musical selections I passed row after row. It was December 1996, the beginning of another bleak winter in

You look like a zombie who’s just seen a ghost, the mirror mouthed back. 

to Mrs. Burrell

When Ms. Griffin was fired, my mother said 
it was because she was too gay, too flamboyant 
for our small charter school. I mourned her 
ombre dreadlocks and her laugh that swept

Nights shipwrecked / in nameless wanting

The city a floating glass 
garden / to be lost in

Banished from the blinked-out streets / we put 
our dollar-store faith / in the claw machine

wager

She didn’t look mad, but she was something. She was moving slow-fast like a cat, something I’d never witnessed, like I could feel how fast she wanted to go but wasn’t going.

Now, you book an appointment on a whim. But it’s not a whim. You’ve been thinking about this for a while.

All around him the congregation erupted. Tears of rapture. Hugs of friendship. Compassionate embraces. Passionate kisses. Erotic caresses.

Previously on...
Prologue

Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie) and John Anderson; A.W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones) and Wynonna; Whitney Ellsworth (Jim Beaver) and Trace Atkins; General Samuel Fields (Franklin Ajaye) and Kenny Chesney; Tom Nuttall (Leon Rippy) and Aaron Tippin

Morning smells like horseradish,
dogshit. The squat toilet in my uncle’s house:
too cramped to hold

a breathing thing. My cousin, barely older
than three, calls me “姐姐, 姐姐,” as she

Are you in my head? Do you know what goes on up here? Do you know what’s preceded all that goes on up here? 

A tendril of smoke dissipated above us. She made an opening in her hands, revealing a little frog. Its throat pumped rapidly.

Like the other day, when we got into a fight about who was the luckier between the two of us to have found the other.