My apartment smells like dead squirrel.
There's a tree outside my kitchen window where an old gray squirrel used to live. He would climb out on the low branches and watch me eating breakfast every morning.
Read MoreI began building tree houses soon after being fired from the fire department for being videotaped smoking at a gas station in front of the pump, repeatedly. The late local news did one of those gotcha stories on me and then their competitors did some follow-ups and before long, there was a petition with six thousand signatures calling for my dismissal.
Read MoreEugene shifted the flatbed Chevy into third and crawled up Sawmill Ridge. He turned Robert Earl Keen up a notch and surveyed both shoulders of the road. The dispatcher, Deidra, had said the accident was just over the hill, and that the roadkill wasn’t pretty, or so she had heard. She said the victim and the police were at the scene.
Read MoreThere was only one stick left in the matchbox. The hands were unsteady; so were the fingers. Yet, with the utmost care that could be summoned, it was lighted by the limping fingers. The flicker, shielded from sea breeze by cupped palms, was lifted up and up until it made contact with the tip of the pipe clenched to the mouth.
Read MoreCement steps banged into metal railings as Robert Riley and I climbed to my second floor apartment. The key, newly cut, fit awkwardly in the lock. When I opened the door, I was confronted by the sudden smell of newly shampooed carpet and mildew, and dust motes floated in sunbeams that penetrated the single dirty window.
Read MoreNewman is a town of well nigh three and half thousand partly transient people eleven hundred kilometers north-east of Perth, Western Australia. It lies in the middle of the Pilbara, and area bigger than Belgium with massive contrasts. An ancient land dotted with mining towns built on the cusp of the mining boom, a boom where there is no sense of slowing.
Read MoreLately, I've been taking my lunch breaks with a guy whose real name is Clarence Dooley but everybody calls Backhoe. Or Backdoorhoe. Or Crackhoe. Depending how the foreman's treating us that day.
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