The streets have terrible breath, it’s said, and everyone hides but the young, who have slick, naked shoulders and fragrant tobacco shreds in the linings of their empty pockets.

“Your mother has problems,” he told the kids.

Look, as we promised each other, we changed nothing and the world is as wonderful as it was, the rain tarries this year, but it will come: it will come as long as we’re still here.

We both lost our appetites, her sense of taste destroyed by the tide of smoke sweeping across her tongue, wiping out her taste buds. Mine was limited to the four tastes the tongue alone could discern,

Mesmerizing, the night’s queer colors, the darkness given depth by the earth’s crystalline sheen, by a sky choked with a million fleeting prisms. In the woods surrounding the house another branch snapped, a gunshot loud crack. The echo lingered, cap

He did it in front of the waiter and everything.

I didn’t like her. I like the name. You know I hate that name. I always thought you were funny. Maybe even more than you were mean.

Justin comes out of the bathroom, finally erect, his hands glistening with K-Y jelly as he chucks the girlie mag into a corner. “I'm ready.” Through the afternoon's soft-filtered light, Kelly watches him climb on top of her and thinks of…

Erwin came into the kitchen through the back door and went straight to the sink to clean up. Black mud and dried blood crusted his fingertips and caked the callused whorls of his knuckles.  He used the round of strong-smelling soap he kept for…

What’s it like, sex? I ask her. You see that picture? she asks, nodding to the large canvas covered with a film of dust propped up against her bedroom wall. That picture’s the only thing she never sold. She hocked it a few times but always got the

Well, I turn the car off, the song turns off, I gather all of my stuff, turn off my lights, inevitably drop something as I’m getting out of the car, shut the door, lock the car, fumble for my house key, walk up the stairs, unlock the front door, set my

A man’s been in jail for six weeks awaiting trial. Lillian doesn’t say his name. A man kidnapped her from the grocery store parking lot. He raped her at his house, and again in the desert, chopped her hand off with an axe and left her for dead in the

People questioned my motives when I became a smokejumper again. They said I had a death wish, or that somehow by going into battle against the big Pacific Northwest forest fires, I was still trying to put out the flames of the burning car in which my sons Jake (age…

At a rest stop in Montpelier, they stopped to buy Cokes and gum from the vending machines. He was showing off, trying to jimmy one of the locks with a safety pin but it stayed locked and she laughed at him and he said goddamn, look at all a them Milkyways

I lay naked on the floor, feet toward the door, so that when my wife entered she would immediately see that leggy thoroughfare, ending at deflated buttocks and chicken-skinned scrotum, and in her repulsion repel me from her life. How wrong I was.