I heard the basketball hitting the pavement in the park across the street, right outside our window... I heard it every day in an evenly spaced rhythm, as if it was keeping time, like a metronome on my life...

. . . the empiricism of the mechanical had wound tight into her, lessons her few calendars could never impart without aid from sundials, hourglasses, clocks.

Instead, I get things like, “Why can’t you find a nice man with cancer or a bum leg?”

I guess at the end you’re only looking forward. Or upward actually, since you can only lie there on your back looking upward, straight ahead toward infinity, your mouth in a grimace, with the ghostly pink lips peeled back from the teeth.

The coin, so little, the watch chain, the youth, the fading softening speech, each hand and finger, the panic modeled on your own eyes, the ashtray, certain stumps along the way, the long distance, the odd feather, the jazz rope gone,…

Are you a hostile person who gets into trouble when you express your anger? Would you like to annoy the hell out of people and get away with it?

everything moved in circles like the music, the booze and the drugs

Jesus is for sale. But he’s heavy.

First he wrote it in wet cement at the intersection: “Tad Loves Kimberley,” with a big heart around it. He was real proud, you could see. But then later on that year, the graffiti began appearing everywhere, on all the store walls: “Kimberle

“Yo, Paciorek. Lend me your DNA, cuz I left mine on the farm, and I have a test tomorrow,” Feller ordered in a commanding voice, because he had gumption.

I was always bi-polar. I didn’t realize it was a mental illness until my divorce lawyer had the court order a psychiatric analysis.

Marie was on the roof. The deck, with its cool concrete pavers and faded cedar Adirondack chairs, was one of the reasons she and Harold had bought their condo in this building. The only ugly part of the roof was the chain-link fence along its edge; soon after they moved…

These were the kind of days children dreamed of. A warm sun shone over Coronado, California. December weather on the island did not prevent outside play. The wind off the bay remained soft, even if chilled. Church let out early. There was time to pla

Buyers of freelance writing have a well-deserved reputation for responding slowly, thereby increasing your pleasure in much the same way that the Pointer Sisters longed for a slow hand.

I was looking for an inn to get a cup of calf soup before jacking ribs at the mutton joint. Feng calls, running numbers on an engine zone out in the valley.