The most beautiful possible thing is to deprive all places of their meanings.

Though some days... I feel as though I'm nothing more than the ultimate hedged-bet should the offender be living out his last days on earth, holding my arm as we both feel our way through the long dark corridors of tragedy.

A married woman requests a butterfly tattoo that won't please her husband from an old tattoo artist.

You're a good dog, she whispered to him, a good brave dog. Her face was tight with soap.

"What the fuck are you looking at, Carl?" She snaps, turning her head toward me as the truck edges off the road and into a field of tobacco, into those broad green leaves of ancient sacristy and modern ablution. This is not a blissful kind of field. It is not full…

now the days are empty and time has lost its head

When we take Vengeance,/ shave and shower him,/ deodorize and scent him,/ clothe him in a starched shirt

"This tastes like goat cheese," I said.

Harold’s a thinker, authors their plans. Last week he swiped six encrusted cans of Stroh’s from a faded cooler in his dad’s garage. He and LS guzzled each one in a chigger-weed patch behind the school gym, slurping and thumbing a stack of purloined

Mostly, though, reiteration of the old/ in an idiosyncrasy that strives/ to become fresh and fails

He didn't hide it. He told her he was a mortician when he called. He had responded to her ad in the Lonely Hearts section of the newspaper.

Solomon just makes people leak. Literally.

A cult is one thing; it defies common sense that a commonly educated person cannot escape cultist thinking and belonging. That cult, A.A., is girded by police, fire, therapy, hospitals, insurance companies, and courts.

I remember meeting you many years later.

I knew my cat was capable of telepathy when I began to have isolated, random, non-cause-related thoughts about food and feelings, little signals, and I realized that the signs — images of tangerines, tuna, bones; the idea of choice; slate, names; the feeling of…