There was gonna be a rumble in our schoolyard. An outright brawl. It was gonna be just like Blackboard Jungle. Only real. Not some movie at the Duwamish Drive-In. Every boy in my school, it seemed like, was lined up outside except me. All the third and fourth graders…

“What do you call this place?” I didn't really want to talk much in there. For some reason, talking felt too—linear. The words seemed to have a kind of reverberation into associations that seemed somewhat meaningless at the time.”

Sometimes Seattle's the next thing to heaven. The sky's diamond blue, the sun's a caress; your whole soul can breathe. You know what the shouting's about. But the sun quickly fades to Protestant gray and the gray last a long…

your olive-pitting thumbs

“You have an impressive pair there,” he says, hands warm as he cups them. “Shame they’re on a man though.”

Harpo sits and looks at something I can't see. I drink beer and ask him questions. I ask him how they found the cancer. Backache, he says. He went to see a doctor.

A night bird lands on the windowsill with a struggling copper moth in its beak. The bird cocks its head at Rasmus, then swallows the clockwork insect in a gulp before flying away.

At the time I first went to work for Mr. Byron my family was in a sorrowful state. My dad, much as I can recall, was one of those roving kinds, called himself a carpenter or contractor, depending on the kind of job he was aspiring to, and was subject to f

They live a simple life..two solitudes by lamplight.

Kramer wraps himself around Kramer’s legs, from behind, then lifts him and tips him up and over and down, per their rehearsed routine.

The bungalow was unlocked. The screen door was unhooked. The trout on the counter was deboned.

After not going out for weeks, I went to a bar and met an electrical engineer, a motorcycle racer who raced in the Black Hills, a Renaissance man, in a relationship with a young married woman, and I told him about the toad.

His footing unsure and his clothes covered in vomit, he grabs the railing and stumbles up the three steps. He pulls off his shirt, finds a cleaner area on the puke-covered garment, wipes sweat off his forehead, dripping wet from the humid, stormy night, a

Oh I'm melting all right, into a foul vapor rising from a dead volcano, not even able to spit fire, but only cold old frozen rock like dribbles of putrid plasma.

At first we envied Tom and Betty’s dancing. Friday nights at The Big Club, Saturdays at Mickey’s, and none of us can remember a time we saw them in the arms of another partner.