Give me a dog that likes to go the vet and I will give you one sad sack of a pet owner. These are the individuals that show up on the 6 o’clock news with something like fifty or sixty mongrels tied outside on chains or worse, are the type that make Captain or Miss…

Leah hates Bennie’s, but not because it’s where we first met. Four years of waiting tables and she’s tired of breathing in the stench and decay of rotting dreams. When it comes to her dreams, Leah pays attention. She lives in Adams Morgan but in a year is heading up the turnpike to take photography…

Whatever your reason, keep it to yourself. Don’t confront your neighbor about the all-night barking or the yard-shitting or the getting-loose-and-jumping-up-on-your-thighs. If you did, besides later knowing who killed the dog and to which address to direct his retribution, your neighbor would respond, “What the fuck are you going to do about it?” When he…

It isn’t difficult. The pipes are stacked up beneath the underside of cement, secured eight to a pile, the ends like the eyes of four sawed-off shotguns, larger than life. Large like an oversized cardboard cutout of Jessica Alba. Like the one Sandy stole from Blockbuster last month for our eighth grade graduation. She’s propped…

Brendan’s son Kerry, now eleven, who pitched a perfect game in Little League at ten, a feat unheard of in Brendan’s or Brendan’s father’s or any of Brendan’s friends’ previous experience, is bent over the chessboard in the family room. He sits there for hours every day now, with no thought of baseball or anything…

The day after Isa’s middle school has a bomb threat, her parents contract the installation of a yellow steel tube slide twisting down from her second-floor bedroom along the staircase to the garden on the side of the house. The same company is installing a fire pole in the center of the house leading to…

The jeweler made jewelry for mothers, grieving mothers. They were the sort of bereft who sit alone in bedrooms, closets, dining rooms, who put on brave faces and stare at stationary objects. Eggshell colored walls. Abandoned winter coats. Gifted flatware. Each mother wept, sat — howled. They were wolves. The jeweler didn’t know the mothers.…

Bob and Jude sat at a booth in the back of the diner. Their seats were covered in green vinyl, torn in several places. Some of the tears had been patched with duct tape, but others, left unmanned, leaked the foam entrails. Bob was eating a grilled cheese sandwich. Jude was eating chicken strips. “I…

I wrote a story about a husband and wife who were both unfaithful to each other but in a way that didn’t hurt anyone. They had loosened the marital bonds just enough that they could each do what they wanted but still go on together. One day the husband found out that he was very…

“I’m spending New Year’s Eve with a girl from the bible school.” My buddies stared at me, shaking their heads. Behind them, here in Ray’s apartment, stood the gleaming keg, the bongs lined up on the window sills like trophies. There was a high stained-glass window. They yanked me to stand in the colored rays…

When our cousins have garage sales, it’s like Christmas, because we get huge trash bags full of shirts, overalls, shoes that didn’t sell. Sometimes, we go to their house before they pack up their driveway, barter with the people who are left, buy a game of Pictionary without dice for ten cents, a pack of…

On that Friday morning, during an April heat wave LA natives didn’t notice, I still believed that I had seen the limit of what could go wrong in my life. I found a clean pair of jeans and enough milk for cereal, folded a to-do list into my bag, and switched the extra-gel shoe inserts…