I ate wild strawberries in the clear cut near the house where my father moved after he moved for the final time. At that house I lived in a trailer under the maple trees in a patch of salmon berries. The clear cut went for miles and miles, filled with foxglove, ferns, strawberries, and ragged…

My mother wouldn’t get out of bed except to take a bath, or go out to sit under the cedar in our back yard to take in the sun. I owned a pair of blue jeans that fit really well. Our family has odd shaped bodies so that store-bought clothes, as a rule, never fit.…

I ran into Nathan Anderson, an old friend, at the Seattle Art Museum at a traveling exhibition of an artist I had never heard of, Edward Hopper, but judging from the reaction of the people walking through the rooms I guess he was pretty famous. I came on these paintings that terrified me. In one…

I live in an older subdivision. The houses were built in the 1960s. At the time they were built, people still believed in canning their own fruit and keeping vast vegetable gardens. The lots are large for this type of activity. Some of the older families keep orchards and vegetable gardens in the way that…

My boss, name of Ross Hayden, really liked the way I handled his business. When the shipping trucks were three days late and our entire supply of white cement ran out, I kept everything in order. At closing time, just as the clock whistle began to blow, the trucks rolled into the parking lot and…

While writing my report, my tooth cracked. I had a lot of work to do in the morning, and in the afternoon I had to be done with my report. The stress of having a deadline that was coming right up, the stress of having something to do immediately, the stress cracked my tooth because…

Several nights a week Jack Ramon picked Mary up and drove her to his house. He came to the porch if her stepfather’s car was home and he’d come out and shake his hand. “Nice to see you, Mr. Carnation,” Mr. Ramon said. Mr. Carnation accepted the handshake and looked at Mary. He didn’t say…

I first heard of novelist Doug Nufer from another writer who had gone to see a reading and said the person who had read (Mr. Nufer) had read from a work in which no word was repeated in the entire piece. The piece wasn’t a paragraph, but an entire novel. The writer seemed both puzzled…

We bought the kettle at the junk store we call the junk store because everything we buy there is junk. The people who run the junk store and even many of the people who frequent the junk store do not realize that they are engaged in the transaction of junk. They do not realize junk…

I couldn’t go back to my apartment because the woman I live with had told me that if I ever came home drunk she wouldn’t even say anything; she would just drive down the block to the U-Haul franchise behind the Big O Tires, and come back with whatever truck they had waiting for her,…

She came into my room to kiss me goodbye. I hadn’t actually thought about Mom really going away to my grandmother’s funeral until I smelled the sharp odor of Camel cigarettes and the faint vapor of green apple hard candy as she leaned down and kissed me on my upper cheek, right next to my…

Hear the flowers grow in the vacant lot across the street from the convenience store where you send me to buy cigarettes now that you have left me. You have left me and in the act of having left me, an act that sounds as if you have opened the door and gone outside and…