“What about the other groups coming here?” I ask. “Were they asked what they wanted in these houses?” She turns and looks at me, like I've suddenly come onto her radar.

You'll be gone. I'll be gone. I'd hate to think how it was all for nothing, that all we did was stumble into a pretty big hole of our own making. The best place for a broken heart after all is in your own sweet chest. No one else…

His eyes drift over the body of every woman who enters Starbucks, even though he’s old enough to be their father or grandfather, still his eyes are aware of every shape passing by, refusing to let go, and die. Maybe they’re speaking Polish or

On a corkboard in the entryway of the Leetonia Shurfine Market a curling handwritten sign said Room for Rent. Kitchen Living Room Laundry Privlages. $65 Weekly.

She asks me what she should do, and I say I don't know because I'm no good at handling fragile things. She says, let's talk about you. I say I can't - phone signal, you know. She calls me anyway, twice, then leaves a message saying that she just wanted to

Alma Tucker settled into middle age with the comfort that escapes most women. Her festival queen days gone. Along with her wispy waist and cherry blond hair, replaced by broader curves and graying tresses. She was content with the way age had changed her

nothing has ever happened in this or that or any other or maybe too damn many parallel universes. . . .

Five poets were beheaded that day, their heads rolled off the scaffold to the dirt and faced skywards; the heads were smiling

Start with a long look down the alley, a small hoodied figure turning in.

After sprouting boobs and a vagina before her sixteenth birthday, a girl watches her divorced father fall from parental grace by drinking ten tequila shots and baring it all for the neighbors to see on his birthday.

January 3rd EST/January 2nd PST 2002 It's 1:45 am or 10:45 pm depending on your philosophy about changing your watch when you fly. My plane is scheduled to land in San Francisco soon, but I'm completely disoriented because I've just had my first post-9/11 dream. …

I sit down next to a youngster on the couch. “Would you like to see?” she asks. “See what?” I reply....

in time there is nothing more important for meto write than this line. It isn't defined in the way you'd like perhaps, but it doesn't matter because it will be true, and you will be true, and I will be the message you get. Some signal has…

...some years later I heard that an old friend jumped off that bridge to her death.

A strange and unexpected shift has occurred.