Glen always had to be the first to fuck his sister, especially before that big galoot from down the street, whom Cheryl really liked to fuck, otherwise Glen would get violent. She had just started having her periods then, I remember. We were all there 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…

what a mess

Their breath stank inside my lungs and tamped down the very minute amount of remorse I had left. It was replaced with contempt. Their fear warmed my cold sensibility as I steeled myself.

The clickity-click of poker chips spills out to the six of us waiting for a table. We're old college buddies, drunk since one this afternoon, sporting the ball caps our wives never let us wear. We brag. About our poker wins, how easy it is to read each other, how we can…

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.

A young woman in shorts removes her sunglasses, putting them on top of her head in order to study a little girl sitting on her father’s lap on the bus. “I want to get me one of those,” she’s says, smiling. Dark eyes, her dark hair wet and hangin

Christmas is here and there's work to do.

We met an old friend and his old dog. We went off leash on the lush Buffalo grass. He and I—this old friend, I mean—talked mostly of divorce, something we shared between us.

I hear all the static in her head, all the fuzzy threads from half a mile away. She hates dirt. She hates the couples who come in and talk stupid lies at each other. It's so simple with her. I ask what she likes. The feeling of soft wool on her bare nippl

The lard-arsed ol’bastard struggling soot-faced and yelling. . . .

A five-star, world famous hotel nearby even had a new fence put around it recently, to keep out the riff-raff. That would include me. The hired help. A gardener.

Mr. Kerouac is the author of On the Road, Big Sur, and numerous other works that defined the Beat Generation, and he's the foremost drunken writer of his time to embrace conservatism.

He and I are still and somber at the kitchen table. We’re both wearing black and stare at each other through blood-shot eyes. The children’s thumps echo on the ceiling above. I think about the other family’s children.

I peeled his tongue, word by contemptuous word, until he had nothing left but a scrappy shred of muscle flapping in his empty head...