Dad’s Super Sport Impala convertible, a large car already, seems much larger now that Mom is driving away from him. The beater doesn’t exactly have a great running record, so it sort of seemed weird to me that Mom chose this as her getaway car. Blair, he’s my older brother, asks Mom, “Who’s going to…

When the boys and I moved into the house Ray Burke provided for us at the end of the dirt road above Bainesville, the last tenants were still packing their things into a Ford pickup truck. Boils of rust spread from the tire rims. The paint had long since faded and worn to what must…

At ten years, old I started to walk home on foot instead of take the bus. My stop, a copse of cedar trees at the bottom of my hill, as the last stop took more than an hour of bus ride to arrive at. I could walk there in about fifteen minutes at a moderate…

You Can’t Win by Jack Black Junky by William Burroughs Queer By William Burroughs Beggars of the Road by Jim Tully Bad by James Carr Ask The Dust by John Fante Ham On Rye by Charles Bukowski Education of a Felon by Edward Bunker On The Yard by Malcom Braly If He Hollers Let Him…

In the dime store in downtown Bainesville, among the racks of Marvel Comics and tufted troll keychains and capsules of glow-in-the-dark worms, I felt like a freak. It figured I should feel like a monster in the podunk town where Mom finally settled after she had taken my brother Dillon and me from the house…

Caught, a fish hollers as it is brought out of the flashing water into the rubber boat. A fish holler is not a mammal holler, but rather the sound of gas escaping from a cartilage cavity. Fishing on a mountain lake involves knives, hooks, and a rubber boat. There is the risk that a metal…

Art Graham King County Jail Seattle, Washington January 20th, 1984 Dear Janice, I, Arthur W. Graham, am not guilty of any crime, even though I have been convicted of one. I do not say that I am innocent or that I did not do what they said I did, which was sell a policeman eighty-four…

The color of the Catskill’s mountains is what I remember from the Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving. I remember the upper riches of the Hudson River. The Hudson River is present in the story, glimpsed from ridge tops and in Van Winkle’s return to his village and in reading the story I cannot escape…

Art insisted that our troubles came from the government’s persecution of us. “We won’t follow the rules,” he said. “We live by ou-r wits and they won’t take that kind of crap from anyone.” I figured they harassed us because we had been selling as much pot as we could grow to a man the…

You, you who are not my ma ma are my friend. If you have not seen my hair dew or me among the dead end people, then you have not observed the social freedom I have indulged in since I have left the streets coated with merbromin in the effort the pharmacy has taken in…

European fairy stories do not usually feature fairies. They might not even include fantastical creatures such as giants, goblins, elves, and talking animals. Both folktales, and fairy stories are rooted in an oral tradition that has thousands of years of history. Both genres feature interplay between the structure of the tale and the execution (or…

Annie and I owned our own house. I found it abandoned at the bottom of a cul-de-sac where no one had built anything new for years. The roof peak rose from a field of sticker bushes. I had to heave my motorbike through twisting vines that snagged my jacket every few feet. I hid my…