Roy Williams was his real name. It had been for the last 15 years. Since retiring from the Firm he’d lived innocuously in an apartment near the Old City walls of Dubrovnik doing the occasional quick job for them. You never entirely retired from the Firm.

He is underneath them. His head is like the head of a worm.

I once saw a TV commercial that showed a group of Anglo retirees laughing around a card table. The slogan 60 is the new 20 floated beneath their fat, fun-loving heads. My parents are bona fide Baby Boomers. Their lives are build on credit and catchy…

So you printed your resume on this coffee cup - that’s something - I wanted you guys to think about me every morning - while you were getting your coffee

As I was reading “Not Your Mother's Book on Home Improvement,” a new collection of light-hearted essays by (primarily) middle-aged female do-it-yourselfers, it became abundantly clear to me that, unlike the women who tell their stories here, I am not a…

Not the torn magazine page, not the smell of ink, not the sweat of palm nor the froth of irish spring

As a boy, he had little hope of ever becoming anything.

The entire room seems waiting for me like an octopus behind a closed, chained door. The monk of the lamp knows he will get his daily turn-on if he prays loudly and just enough for it. The favorite chair has my blue dent in its punched…

Camilla and I watched a movie, then we were the movie. A man wandered in a decrepit house, or in a dream of a house, which had wallpaper hanging like shredded flesh and little mounds of filth and a madwoman with a butcher knife creeping from room to room with fear or…

here’s the deal… sorrow follows tears… pain later for the happiness now… is the joy something we only borrow…?

Clatters and clatters ensued, and the splash destroyed all denial.

Lullaby for a dragon baby who breaks the bough with bottled fists escapes the armored cradle stealing swords from terra cotta men to slash the Ming canopy and loose the butterflies that will free Ho Chi Minh from the fire.

was entering into a new phase of its existence, a peculiar paradigm of the wider world where, presaged by science, economic and political ideologies were conspiring to displace the old verities of religion and aesthetics, but where…

I gently honked my horn and gave her the kind of friendly neighbor wave that only friendly neighbors can give. She didn’t wave back. What the hell is her problem?

My Mother always said that a storm was death knocking.