My son comes for a rare visit on his horse — contemplate the gall of it. He ties off to my mailbox. Destrier stamps marigolds; it looks like the End Times have started in my yard. “Come in, son,” I say, and pat his back with a halfhug. He pushes a paper bag into my hands.
Read MoreShe makes a game out of hiding the bottles in the woods. Her father goes to work building whatever building needs building that week, sometimes driving as far out as Sullivan County down old M12. L puts down her book—her father likes to see her reading, let him know he's done this one thing right—and tiptoes into the kitchen. She doesn't need to be quiet but that's part of what makes it like a game.
Read MoreA boy in my high school showered three times a day. He wore sunglasses inside and had sex with my best friend. Their families vacationed in Florida at the same time.
Read MoreThe year after their baby died, they sold their furniture, her skis, his table saw. Then they donated most of their clothes. They asked to see tiny houses, no larger than 500 square feet. “Bill and I are buying a house on wheels,” Amanda told their families. “We’re going to travel like gypsies.”
Read MoreI received your letter two months after marrying Mike. The letter was printed in blue Courier font and the graphics were abysmal.
Read MoreMaybe he shouldn’t call her that. Too girly. A diminutive pet name focusing on what she looks like. Too old fashioned, he worries, something not for girls anymore these days, something his parents’ or grandparents’ generation would have said alongside white picket fences and a green, well-manicured lawn, the station wagon in the driveway, its cargo top filled with the colors of summer escapes. She’s more than that.
Read MoreAfter supper, we took the kids down to the road next to Bryson's Pond to see the body. Picture ran in yesterday's paper of the accident. The kind of thing that makes news in our small town: smashed up car with the hood rammed through the interior and door sheared off, its body leaning against the telephone pole like a drunk too afraid to take another step.
Read MoreA cop car pulled up next to me as I stood at the crosswalk of the empty intersection, on an empty summer night. I heard the static of dispatch through the car’s open window.
Read MoreIn bleached out archival footage that never really existed, I learn about Amelia Earhart. I see her tear-scrunched face held together in a blindfold on some island that happened to catch her little propeller plane that couldn’t quite. For whatever reason, it just couldn’t quite.
Read MoreSamantha and I are both “the babies” when we play house. Samantha has better dolls, so we stage our house in her bedroom. Her closet doors are mirrored, and so when we play house, it’s like there are four of us—Samantha, Samantha’s twin, me, my twin—and when we skip and dance and laugh, we multiply even more.
Read MoreMom loved that eagle cam so bad. She watched it like she watched NASCAR and Seinfeld in the 90s. Two feet from the screen and both hands in a bag of Martins. All day she stayed glued.
Read MoreGreat. Now you’re crying in the middle of giving a blowjob. Luckily, Steve the engineer isn’t paying attention to your face. With a mouthful of his cock, and one of your hands pumping double time, he better be completely transported.
Read MoreT-SRB, the one-time unrepeatable success of simple-to-complex mechanics and anti-oxidation aerosols, rubber gaskets and greased bearings, runs entirely by the perpetual-motion heart. Estimated half-life: six-thousand years.
Read MoreThe pipe bomb will be eight inches in length, two inches in diameter. It will contain shards of broken glass, some nails, a few screws. It will be born after Jimmy Reed has one bad day too many, after Matt Lacey hip-checks him face-first into his locker, after the right lens of Jimmy’s glasses cracks and the frame bends and the air vents scrape his sideways-turned head, drawing blood.
Read MoreDean keeps asking me hypotheticals. Takes swigs of vodka and raises his pool cue for another shot. “How ‘bout you were in a day-old toilet, and shit is all you have to eat. Would you eat it or would you rather die?” I take my turn and tell him if he asks me one more question I will pose my own, and he won't like his choice between death and death.
Read MoreMany years ago, my wife and I were living in New York City together making landscape drawings. We were squatting in this abandoned apartment, so whatever money we made we spent on movies and food. We had a friend who worked at an art house cinema, and she gave us free popcorn—we saw lots of foreign movies and bad student films.
Read MoreThings were almost over between us, but we didn't know that. It was a mild December. You needed help moving your belongings from the dorm to your parents' house for the holidays. We spent a whole half-hour sorting and discarding the minefield of your car.
Read MoreShe peeled an orange and found an avocado, the sort of week it had been. The feel of buttery green on her tongue failed to be what she needed as she ate it. Between trips to the cleaners, the library, the morgue, she held her hands steady on the wheel— the grip of an adult, certain and not trembling, her gaze definitely not looking left at the swish of angels, their wings like a coat of rain across the grass.
Read MoreNo one I know has ever been to Taliaferro County, so I don’t believe it’s real. There is data out that says it has 1,700 or so residents and I’ve never met a single one. The closest I’ve come is I found a couple guys in a bar in Atlanta one night who said they owned a few thousand acres in Taliaferro between the two of them.
Read MoreThat part of me yet unclaimed the girl’s body before the baby before the boy before the first opening my fingers my hands I want that skin that soft unscarred belly those breasts not yet bursting suns I want that body back I want her…
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