“Really? And you write…?” asked her breasts in the black dress, making excellent eye contact. He smiled at them.

At this time of night, the fluorescence makes his eyes bleed. The muscles in his legs are tight; walking's more of a necessity than anything else. Alexander pushes the shopping cart down the endless gray tile floors of the Grand Union on 35.

He picked up the bottle of gin, looked at it. "Not a lot left," he said. "There's enough," she replied. She took the bottle and lifted it to her lips. "Are you ready?" she asked. "For what?" "You'll see."

After lunch it's vocal coaching: shrieking, screaming, crying Oh-my-God!-Oh-my-God!-Oh-my-God!, panting and face fanning. Next it's ‘situational training', where we pretend to be audience members on real talk shows and practice everything we've learned th

It wasn't until about 2:30 that my hairpiece began mauling small children.

leaning over the banister, her Christmas waist making the wood swoon and creak, a warning sign if there ever was one...

A girl waiting at the door, heart in a Ziploc. An elderly woman stopping at the bank. A bear in a screaming contest with a troop of girl scouts.

...It's my advice that this Fourth of July the Office of Homeland Security post the following instructions on your web site www.Ready.gov — people should act like my dog Lucy and just stay inside under the bed and tremble...

I don't really know, though. I've been locked in a beer cave for the last ten years of my life. I was just let out by some frat boys who were looking for Natty Light.

In the beginning the revolution was all motion and energy. When the President for Life resigned motion and energy disappeared with the sounds of clapping hands.

The first time they were separated, he rediscovered music and writing.

The giant hurled threats and insults. He brandished a knife that was a foot long.

It was Brad, for short; or so he would say. But really his name was Bradford, and he was a writer. He had almost always lived in New York. He was only half-white. His mother had run away with a black man in the sixties. Her father had told her to never come back to…

I flip up my hoodie, pull the string tight across my lips until it cuts into them, pull tighter, saw back and forth until blood warms the hairs on my chin.

The scaffolding had been difficult to construct. The rock floor of the bluff offered no purchase, so he'd been forced to anchor braces to the trees behind, then span some thirty feet. A cantilevered gallows reached another fifteen feet past the stage...