He boarded the wrong plane. (Hey, it could happen. Maybe not after 9/11, but certainly before)

In Nebraska, we found a dead man lying between the furrows of a field. He’d been there awhile in the heat and the sun, the only shade provided by a cloud of flies. The dead man lay on the ground, decaying, disappearing into the dirt:

Maybelline Jones is my sister, my friend, and I try to tell her the right way to be.

I HAVE NOTHING MORE TO SAY TO YOU, she lisps, and, with this, the fissure in the man’s head reaches the bottom of his chin and the hollow head splits in two.

for E. …

I came down with polio on September 15, 1953, a mild, smoky day drawing close to autumn outside of Chicago — which also happened to be the exact date of my parents' twenty-first wedding anniversary. Only six months later the Salk vaccine was already b

Real men don’t screw around in Canada, he confided to the strawberry blonde sitting beside him at the Houston bar. He’d bought her a couple of beers, and her body language said she was interested.

Of course, there was one love Danica had in her heart that stood above all those luxuries, magic.

Frankie's girl had a habit of making any guy she walked past turn his head and lose his entire train of thought-we all knew it. Frankie was the only one who asked her out to have lasted long enough and worked hard enough to the point of putting a ring on

So we waited for it to get dark. I smelled her there beside me against the tree, and fell asleep and dreamed of an unbombed stone church whose steeple was so high it pierced the clouds. It's time, came a voice from one of the back pews. “It's…

The last time Ray and I broke up, I flew my flag at half-mast. It was the kind of thing that pissed him off. He was very big on flag etiquette: how the flag should be folded, the fact that it should never touch the ground, when to fly it at half-mast, the rules regarding…

“Why have you not voted Mindeo”, Tidi squeaked. “Because there is a third way. If we stay only here, we will eventually be driven out. To attack the erect worms to extend our…

When Carlotta left me, I cried / into my soup. I shriveled into / harsh mathematics.

They always referred to her as the possum woman back home. She scoured the streets just as the sun fell into deep slumber behind the sentinel, sun tanned shoulders of the mountains encircling small town anywhere.

a question that (never) left