Let’s talk about Chattanooga, the cloud / mountains, the monastery bench, drunk / at sunset

Cleaning the dust bunnies from under our lives, Zin says she wants to move to the country, maybe someplace as big as Texas. She claims that lately she's having trouble breathing between bricks or talking to hot chestnut vendors with rubber faces. It's giving her nightmares…

Winter melts to ashes and now we walk where hillocks dip like pillows, where a warm pocket of air keeps the scent of spring beauties for itself. Sensitive vetch so easily shocked folds under a feather yet the earth trembles where trout lilies shove. Buds stall on lilacs…

I want to break that mug. (Break him.)

As Mayumi ran toward the battle, she watched helicopters over the giant centipede explode and rain down on the street below. Lightning bolts, fireballs, and water balls that burst into rain, littered the skies.

Then I would say to my new friends, “My God, look at all the weight you’ve lost.” Even when they hadn’t lost any. Even when they were fatter than before.

Butchie was the one who heard about the bonfire happening over on Harrison Avenue.

He was dead when he tried to wake up. “Wake up,” he yelled silently to himself, although it didn’t sound silent to his voice. “Brr, brr, brr,” shouted his alarm clock as it glared two red fives, a colon and a seven

The hair on my arms have greyed, or so that's how it looks to me. It's been 12 years since we last spoke. I think I haven't aged too well. I bought a rocking chair.

A secret search rolled from Odette's eyes. A gulch split her down the middle and she had the world believing this was the way she liked it. Odette was a woman who spent entire days bending backward within herself, never letting on that she was…

Momma called them Vaughens, "a outfit," and said, "they shoulda throwed the book at that Darla Jean."

Sometimes cats had to die or dogs

Here they come, those witnesses.

Steam rolls out of the bathroom as Mr. Larson opens the door with a white towel around his waist. Pepper strolls up to him and purrs as she rubs her long, gray tail against his tanned legs."Hey, girl.” He runs his coarse, scarred fingers through the cat's soft coat.…

Whenever Mommy was gone, Josh Forcett's father made him eat staples, often by the spoonful.