She wanted one, she said. She wanted one who looked like me. I wanted one, because I wanted her. I wanted her for everything; I wanted her to fill every crack and space inside of me.

Helen’s mind is not on business. It’s on a pinpoint, a potential, a something so microscopic it’s more a nothing. In her center, it hums.

You are a boy with a birthday bike smiling like our son, standing in a photograph surrounded by other sons, who turn rocks over and over, who keep snakes in plastic bread bags, who find the bones of something wild in the woods. You smile that way still.

She didn’t think of herself as an undesirable, no, she didn’t, but did find herself cowering in face of the presumed judgment of those around her. They had more money, more clout, more everything.

You love your wife and would never do anything to hurt her. In thirteen years of marriage you’ve never been unfaithful, never done more than glance at another woman. Until tonight. Tonight you got lucky. Oh God, how you got lucky!

“Where do you want your mustache?” Melanie asked. “You can have it on the side, you know, or, if you prefer, across your labia, in which case it will also look like a cross?”

  Crea grew up above a pet store and now she dreams of cats. There are too many of them to name, a slinking mess of calico, tabby, tortoise-shell, black and white. There are more each night. They whisper to her, words made of hissing mewls. During the…

K is eating a banana. He says to me, "There is no end in the sense that God is dead, or history is dead. I would prefer not to play the role of a thoroughly useless prophet. I leave that to others, like Gene McCarthy."

Do not shake the baby. Shake the martini. That’s what martinis are for.

Two lovers — their genders / faces / social identities / etc. up to the viewer’s imagination (though I caution you, dear reader, not to imagine yourself in this role due to the psychic intensity of the following passages) — writhe against each other

Two summers later, the ritual began. Carol left her house at midnight, having served her husband and daughter a heavy dinner that left them caged in their sleep. She was like a thief working in reverse: she rose from bed with her husband’s first snore,

        The first one was dark and angular, coiled-looking inside an expensive suit.  Over her food at a small table in the hotel bar, Francesca had been unable to look at anything else but him.  Out of the suit, unsprung on a king-sized hotel bed, his skin…

It happens. Someone blows something off, someone else forgives it, then tat for tit and verse visa, and you’re missing someone’s wedding because you thought it was Thursday and they didn’t mention it to you anywy, but you’re still BFF and don’t

To find myself in a straight relationship which challenges my communications skills and tries my patience while improving my status among my peers and family.

IT SNOWED all day the Monday after Thanksgiving. After supper and homework, my brother, Will, and I sat in the narrowly opened window of the second floor apartment where we lived and watched the older kids run their bicycles down Sweet's Hill and hit their brakes at…