Waking in the middle of the night, tangled in the hotel sheets, I wanted to hear the story again: their pilot friend, the war, his specialty. "It's just a screw, son," Dad said, "nothing exotic."

A son packs his bag - bottled water, extra masks, and jerky. Mom paces behind him. “Don't go.”

I awake one morning to find that still, the leaves continue to fall.

No snippets for you.

The Numbers will never romp up the stairs from the laundry room to slip warm socks on your feet on a winter’s night.

It was all I was convinced / in designing the encounter.

When her husband left she was not yet thirty

Jack would have felt betrayed, and my parents alarmed, had they ever suspected me of playing with Jack's guns, but I found the temptation overwhelming.

His thought was shattered then by the horrible grind of the telephone in the hall. Surely not for me, he thought. One of the other tenants has a friend who’s landed vipivka, no doubt after 39 straight days of hunt. Booze is so damnably hard to find

an ominous figure of fear and grace a ball moves back and forth

Hunger only makes people hungry, but bad hair can ruin your whole day.

Matthias Fenstermacher loved onions, but hated slicing them, and so he labored to produce a tearless variety. His first attempt was indeed tearless--instead of weeping, the slicer was overcome by fits of uncontrollable giggles. The potential hazard was

I look at that wall, it has piss-stain yellow paint and water scars from several years of leaky pipes. I say I wouldn’t mind that, if he took out some of that wall.

I stand at the edge of the water naked as a newborn. Tiny ripples lick my toes.

fire, fire