When I am asked if I am getting better my reply should be “No” because my symptoms have not changed.  But when somebody asks me this question they often offer such a look of concern or hope that I am compelled to answer “Yes,” instead. After I say “Yes” the person perks up so quickly. She…

First meet of the season and in the locker room they huddle slick and weightless and pray to Our Lady of the Individual Medley, Our Lady of the Flawless Back-to-Breast-Stroke Flip-Turn, Our Lady of the Plastic Lane Lines. They pray to be turned into salt water, into mermaids, into dolphins or jet engines. They pray…

Boys, you notice, have perfect hair. It sticks up in just the right way — after a swim meet, after a soccer match, after changing their shirts. You think their hair is the best thing about them, even when they wrestle, finding a thing they want in someone’s hand — a box of matches, a…

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…