I don’t even know how Mom first heard the story. It’s not like we lived among Indians or even knew an Indian, though sure, I get why she told it now. In the story, which I must have heard two dozen times, or more, this tribe of Indians is out on the plains — “What…

People are a lot tougher than you think, you know. A lot of them are hurting inside but you’d never know it because they act just fine. All high and mighty and brave and gallant, every time you see them, and you’d never know it but they’re really hurting. My boss was suffering from pancreatic…

The Madison Square Garden jumbotron shows me looking up and almost falling over backwards. The crowd murmurs as I lean over the piles and piles of glistening bratwurst, the cheap plastic patriotic tablecloth in red, white, and blue — the sound of 20,000 people squirming, shifting in their seats. They’ve come to see me eat…

Cards, jacks and wooden guns with clothes pins clipping rubber bands like bullets stretched tight and ready. These were my toys. My stories were of ghosts told by a frail woman, a Christian for decades, who told them as the truth, the way a grandmother will do and a good churchgoer. My favorite toy was…

“Airside” appears in the collection SaltWater, recently published by Liberties Press. I. Take-off — Tasha Planes always make me feel extra safe and relaxed. Maybe it’s that thing with the oxygen masks and the inflatable jackets and those chutes you never get to slide down: it’s great the way none of this has changed since…

A woman, red lipstick on her mouth and her eyelids, buys a twenty-five cent pack of peanut butter crackers, and gets change back from the five note in cash. She uses cash to buy penny and nickel candy — which isn’t eligible as food. I’m supposed to throw her out when she comes in, but…

I rubbed my eyes with clumsy numb fingers. The figure was still there when I peeked. It lumbered along the tree line, wraithlike in the falling snow. I thought, at first, that someone might have come to rescue us. A state trooper, maybe. But this was no state trooper. It stood taller than a man,…

We would be walking up an empty road. It would be the dead of night. The dead of night would sound silly coming from our mouths but we would say it. It would smell like something being incinerated, eviscerated, burning always burning. You would say, Bacon? To get me to laugh. Our feet might make…

A little more than a year after my brother, Henry, disappeared, my aunt opened a boarding house for ghosts. The Haunt-Away, she called it. She advertised in the local newspaper just before Halloween and got more than a few confused still-living spirits. She turned them away and advised them to come back once they had…

When I hear the scream, I run to the bathroom expecting to find that my wife has slipped in the shower while trying to cut her toenails, her skull split in half from the impact of the faucet or ceramic soap shelf. Or I am expecting to find her lying on the imitation sheep-curl rug…

Her fingers were long and slender and too clean to be part of the human body, a thing that inevitably fails. She played with the straw in her Fribble the way little girls do, except, of course, that she was my mother. She was forty. It was the first day of summer, the last day…

Deirdre is looking into the brown paper bag. The face she has on her, you’d swear he was after giving her a bag full of fresh turds, though to be fair they don’t look like much. — Fuck’s sake, Declan, I said diamonds. Diamonds is what you bring back from Amsterdam. — They’re bulbs, Declan…