Then a flicker caught my eye. To the left of the balcony, where the residential high-rise abutted a commercial building to its right, a shape--half-dark, half-lit--stood on a limestone ledge.

We weren't supposed to talk about Jimmy's glass eye. We just had to watch it stare at us all wonkie, without knowing a thing about it.

I always sat in the backseat of the Dodge when my Dad drove, never in the front seat beside him. It was safer there when he ran over the dogs that wandered onto the road.

The old man had always known things, was feared and revered up and down the valley for knowing things. I’d heard the stories since the day I was born.

A man asleep on a stack of tires in front of a tire shop on 10th Aveune, NYC. A store that’s “open 25 hrs,” where apparently time is being manufactured. The unknown new element, the 25th hour, even though the other 24 may have been shortened som

A rose and two dollars. Where did they come from? I didn't know anyone who had visited my parents' grave recently, yet that evening I saw a white rose on my mother's side and two bucks on my father's. I took the money and placed my own flowers with the rose. It had to have…

8) An exercise online calls for the first sentence on page 45 of the book nearest you as a suggested description of your love life. The book 9) nearest me still is _The Quarterly_, 1, spring 1987, that I have on my desk in preparing to write an essay.

He got tired of the pool party, the chit-chat, the suburban posturing, and he decided to swim home.

Those who love aluminum bellies and landing gear and ailerons... that ilk... settled at the western edge of of LAX 24R 6L and called the encampment Flight Path.

The porous bear the anchorite’s vial

My friend once told me about this island of trash in the Pacific. He said that if you threw a piece of trash in any body of water it would find its way there somehow.

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.

Her dress swirled around her as she stepped into the ballroom, looking every bit as sultry as her recent Playboy cover...

It is another evening of ordinary sand. The moon worms, all mellow and white, glow shine over the laminated floor. Shay's bladder is full, and protesting with a thump of ache. Shay holds on nervously.Last time she pissed tiny silver fish that roiled in the froth of her…

...this dim and empty room, and behind a wall of glass a flag materialized, backlit and fluttering, and I am not saying what country's flag it was, just that it was a flag, that awesome symbol of the nation state and fervid jingoism...