"I looked at this skinny, little female child, Meadow Simms. It wasn't only that she was small. Meadow Simms didn't look like other children. Her parents were hippies."

I walked her home. She lived eight blocks in the opposite direction of me, but it made her smile —I made her smile.

The sky is orange and red. It’s getting dark out by the time Sophie goes inside to tell Mom. The colors of everything fade together and turn gray, even the grass and my pink bicycle.

Once, an elephant contracted a sudden bolt of insanity in the streets of Ernakulam and trampled three children under her feet before she was shot to death. It took them seven bullets to bring her down.

The swamp cooler is broken. No hope of a breeze. The weatherman said it that way--no hope.

Mama reads about UFOs in paperback books and newspapers with big cloudy pictures. Her girlfriends know about flying saucers, too. They get drunk at night when they are sitting all alone in their living rooms because they are divorced or married to men who

The large black pedals on the red/Tricycle rotate, push along the cracked,/Weedy surface.

We were pushing ninety down the highway through a stretch of what rightfully should have been called the Badlands. We were both absorbed and coping with the rapidly escalating stages of desperation and so neither of us noticed when the yellow figure stepped…