—You must be joking, he laughed.

She asks if I only write about men, which I tell her is redundant. I also answer, “Yes, but sometimes I write about them as race cars, hyenas, vaginas, or God.” She smirks like she wants to smile, but it’s stuck halfway out her door. Her happiness has

Val walks through the world, absorbed in the day to day. A plainspoken narrator drones on in his mind. The nondescript voice marks time to the beat of Val's banal footfall, hums along with the whir of Val's modest, midsize sedan. The narration is loudest in the twilight…

Just move out.

Every day is exactly the same.

“Are you my neighbor in 3D?” Was she?

We were just as bourgeois as Bloomingdale’s, one generation past canned ravioli dinners with cheap white bread.

It was hard to believe that, even very recently, there had been first days of school where nothing happened.

The thing was, though, she couldn’t shake the image of that dead dog she had found inside the black trash bag she thought could be first base, right before the twins said, Screw the game, let’s swing.

We were pushing ninety down the highway through a stretch of what rightfully should have been called the Badlands. We were both absorbed and coping with the rapidly escalating stages of desperation and so neither of us noticed when the yellow figure stepped…

Almost to the elevation of regret.

Such behavior will result in no disciplinary action only: 1) if all blinds are drawn; 2) all doors are locked; and 3) loud groaning is masked by appropriate use of the volume control on the classroom’s closed-circuit TV set.

"I made up my mind then, in the backseat, sucking on a cherry Popsicle, that I wanted to be like Ruby’s mother..."

*A"Cento" which is a "patchwork poem" using the words of other writers. for V.W. …

On stage, students from the junior college join children from the community to speak and sing in American-French accents. They are timid, heart-broken, in love, rebellious, faithful, resigned to their fates—and all in the matter of a few short hours.