“You know who Neil Peart looks like?” Gram said, ignoring Aaron's outburst.

They could have heard a pin drop in the car for the rest of the ride to her house, where she looked at him one last time and found nothing admirable, nothing memorable about him.

I’ll tell you what’s wrong

I remember thinking the seasons are arriving later every year, as if the world has been slowed by the weight of graves.

Not long ago, Owen the Second showed her a skull. He kept it in a brown cardboard box in the top of the closet. "My first wife," he said, and sneered, his lip bunching up around a scar just under his nose.

Twice burned, it buries its graves.

The sun is going to slice your goddamn face open.

What she didn't tell me was that her brother Carl got fried during an electrical storm.

"I think you're a great candidate for a sentinel node biopsy," said Dr. Kartes. They sat in the small, dark office. On the sofa, not touching. She still wouldn't take his hand.

Look at her. She doesn't want to be here. The kiss and “wouldn't miss it for the world” was as empty as her crossed arms, crossed legs, and jittery foot were loaded. She attacked the foam of her latte with a tiny red straw. I wanted to scream. Complain about the…

Elvis awoke in a cold, dank sweat, hungover from bourbon and bad dreams.

Their specialty is the roasted Australian hare, long ears intact, arranged on a bed of sassafras.

Kitchen. sandwich. wife. daughter.

The Black Thing spread over the room, eating away his mother's face as well as the doctors and nurses who dashed in a frenzy around him until they too were swallowed in the black singing cloud.

The museum’s catalog description changed much less than the painting over those years. He wasn’t curator-in-chief of catalog descriptions, however, that task went to a curator arriving by another door.