"... I knew Willie had gone— out the back door or out the side window. I knew he probably slipped over the fence behind my house into Lou C.’s backyard..."

All through their descent sequence K’var had nervous premonitions.

Listen to him barking in the night. Fear shifts on the bed next to you, hogging the covers. Stare at the ceiling and wonder what to do. Forget his birthday. Forget he is forty-two. Forget the phone call from Berkeley twenty-one years…

In time's embroidery, the human storyis a short stretch of a short strand within the thread of half a knot-and that stretch of strand's defective. What will mourn us when we're gone?Not the plants which live so lightly on the earth.Not the scorpions and not the ants.Perhaps…

Things looked way too normal to be normal. The cold, gliding black eyed swans never once straying far from each other's wake, the cute blue jeaned lovers everyone secretly watched carefully picking their trickling way over small odd rocks and…

The apple his slightly necrophiliac kiss saved her from soaks in the petrified sun, turned to leather, like a screaming skull of summer in its glass enactment case.

Jimmy Gollihue awoke to the howling of a bloodhound ...

I try to slot into order the sequence of events: the book deal that appeared and then winked away like a dying star, the white gloves and the brick through Waterstone's window; my novel lying in the shop front in a bed of glass.

We never meant to gain their confidence only to outgrow them. They were once our best friends, the ones who listened, the ones who understood or sat across from us so we could see them nod. They leaned…

If you’re Frederick in this moment, you are watching from that balcony and start to scream your fool head off. Maybe you just think you scream, and you might have screamed, but what you really do is clutch at your chest, black dots spanning each eyeball,

“I thought bankruptcy was for people who didn’t have any money.” Skipper said. “Not exactly. It takes a lot of money to go broke,” I said, hoping to teach him an important lesson about thrift.

For the briefest moment, she was part of the sky. She hung there. Frozen. Suspended. Arms outstretched. She thought maybe she could take off flying, if she strained against gravity hard enough. She would soar into the pale blue until she reached the clouds. They …

Everyone hoped to be assigned somewhere they could just drop in on their way home for Memorial Day weekend. Someone said, Blake, you’re single. You hate your family, don’t you?

Many colored eyes move slow between the mirror and my heart, begging questions. I offer no explanation. None suffice to breed either my content or theirs.

"You look awfully familiar," said one of the corrupt oil company execs to the dark-haired man with the sunglasses and big sideburns.