They could not decide how to execute the man. First, they laid the man’s head on a rock — they were going to cut the man’s head off with an axe. But then an axe could not be found. One of the executioners said, “Anyone have an axe?” and the other one laughed. Because there…

Two things I have noticed. If you place a bowl on a shelf, even high up and what you imagine to be out of the way, it will eventually contain something: a desiccated spider, a moth, a bleached ladybug. The other is that the skin receives the cat’s claws as though expecting them. The strikes…

Maybe there’s a house. Maybe it’s in Maryland — as good a place as any to live. Maybe there’s a fire, maybe it starts in the kitchen, these things happen, and it leaps from the stove to the curtains to the wall to the ceiling, and maybe the house gives into fire, and her brothers…

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…