Christine comes back from the future looking tired, which is the opposite of what I expected. For some reason, I imagined the future as being invigorating. But she walks into the apartment and abandons her suitcase by the front door, collapses into a heap on the couch next…

My grandfather rode with the Czar’s army. He was abducted from a village in Austria, trained to pillage and drink, plunder and rape, and ride the best horses that could be had. They were given the best vodka and the sharpest swords. They were all just boy

Fritz Lang. Even before I ever met the miserable son of a bitch, with his monocle and superior airs, I hated him. In person, he was an insufferable asshole.

I'm standing outside your window with our son's fingers in my fist.

On Saturday mornings, by noon, the delivery car comes from Boston and unloads fresh bread and sandwiches, pork ribs and ground pork stuffed inside of breads and buns and banana leaves, bean shakes, and sticky rice desserts.

Thomas Friedman was right when he said, “Much of this biodiversity in Indonesia is now under threat.” It had been this way since gasoline became currency; I remember bartering with The Governance for the newest edition of The Guinness Book of

I found the knife in a fishing box in the closet. The box was made out of varnished wood. My father’s father had made it.

Frank says if I eat the whole bowl of live crickets he’ll give me five dollars and his grandfather’s silver bullet from the war.

The neatly-gentrified Mtsensk District plaster buckled in all the right grey-painted places. The aged, yellowing windows rose and fell in fashionable decay. It was a well-upholstered citizen's slum, drawn to exacting state specifications. Local housing authorities…

Things have happened. It’s a given. What, are you crazy? Of course things have happened. It’s the world, for Christ’s sake. Things are happening. I am consistently missing most, if not all, of them.

But not once did we mention heaven. The next day we bought another one.

I'm somewhere on I-10 in Mississippi, barreling westbound at 80 miles an hour through a rainstorm on a late Wednesday afternoon. The last road sign I remember was for Beauvoir, some Confederate general's…

I counted telephone poles and the seconds between them. The old highway cut straight through the sand and it seemed the road would never end. No curves. No hills. Just poles.

The possibility for numerous outcomes – the possibility of anything, really – lives on the writer’s page.

Opposite the foothills, on the field's southern edge, was a stand of old eucalyptus trees, each one a gnarled sentry with bark like burnt skin peeling from its trunk.