Fourteen cowboys by the fire, laying out and crouching, stinking. The herd behind them settling down. The fire eating what brush and wood they’d gathered. When they’d gathered, their dogs had found a dead man in a parched ravine. All could see he’d lately been alive, yet to be stripped of boots and belt. He’d…

It was never hard to find the secrets in the sand. A tiny bump as the surf retreated, an almost invisible disturbance in the surface of the beach and there I was, already digging. People never bothered to bury them very far underneath, either. A half-hour yielded a small pailful of colorful, patterned orbs —…

An excerpt from the novel Death of an Animatronic Band 1. P.I.‘s When the investigators came, they came in dark suits with dark sunglasses and pencil thin moustaches. One was fat, the other thin. They wore ties. Leather shoes. They wore hats that shaded everything but the tips of their noses. They smelled like old…

The father is speeding home from work. He wants to beat the darkness. He’s not used to it. There are too many trees in this new life he has made. Tall ones. They block the sun in the early and later hours. By the time he’s on his way home from banging nails, it’s nowhere…

Out on Lake Erie, the Big Thing bided its time aboard ship, approaching the Port of Toledo. Along Airport Highway, a mile or so inland, a city bus smoked past me as I arrived at work. Airport is a large four-lane thoroughfare on the western outskirts of town near the airport it serves. As you…

I. 7:46 AM A discarded newspaper is lying on the bench of the bus shelter, and Caroline Muir picks it up. January 14. It’s yesterday’s. President Wallace won’t run again; Vice President Pressman has officially announced his candidacy; Senator McCarthy is being investigated by HUAC; some limited extensions of wartime rationing will still continue; the…

1. It’s always been my habit to keep a couple of square snap-shots housed in the clear plastic windows of my wallet. I like how those small faces glimpse out when I casually open the wallet, whether it’s to finger out a business card or a five dollar bill. “This is Cheryl,” I’ll say, noting…

Three miles separated the couple’s home from the juncture of the great highways. The woman had once seen the interchange from above. A helicopter ride with, of all people, her priest. They wore headphones with microphones but still had to shout. There was excitement then, the interchange new, and with its cut ribbon came promises.…

Excerpted from the newly published collection Fractals For Emily Dickinson LET IT BE AUTUMN. Let it be another town. Let the houses be lowrise, undistinguished, a mix of old and new. Let the doctor’s surgery in a terraced sidestreet be new sandbrick with a porthole window and double doors, and thick brightly-coloured metal bars at…

About the bloody pair of shoes on her fireplace mantle, she said, “Those are the shoes I lived through the plane crash in.” I was picking her up for our first date — blind, determined by a sophisticated algorithm on Match.com — and had been waiting in her living room, sipping ice water out of…

Tonight, I built a kite. I taped together chopsticks we’d saved from every order of Bang Bang chicken to make the frame. I wound and glued fat string to make a bridle on the spine, stretched a white garbage bag across the chopstick skeleton, and tied on tails made from a pair of my old…

On Pine Street, there is a dog that takes himself for walks. His owner, a short, thin, balding man with larger than average ears, opens the gate to their yard at 8:30AM. The dog, a Newfoundland, big and black and hairy, walks out unleashed. The man closes the gate and goes inside. The dog walks,…