10. People don’t realize Mary Shelley’s monster isn’t ever actually referred to as Frankenstein in the story. The monster’s inventor, Victor Frankenstein, provides readers loads of great names with potential for traction, like Vile Insect, Daemon, Wretched Devil, and my personal favorite, Fiend. But still everyone calls him Frankenstein. I think that’s kind of messed…

I can never get lost. One thing I like about living in Kenmore Square next to Fenway Park right below the CITGO sign — you can see it from anywhere in the city. Beneath that glowing sign I first met my wife Tara, one of these hefty, big boned treasures, a six-footer with shiksa freckles.…

Merrill thinks about milk. “I was just a boy yesterday,” he says. “I feel like Tom Hanks. That movie can’t be just a movie. Life is so short.” Youth is a phantom limb, he thinks. “I can’t remember ever being this young.” Rosa says, “You’re not Tom Hanks.” I want to do everything all at…

Until Karen, he’d never met an adult who was afraid of the water, who didn’t know how to swim. This was just Kentucky — no ocean for miles — but still. Not long after he and his parents moved to Bardstown, into the big house with the big in-ground pool in the backyard, they seemed…

My old man used to tell me about rumors. He’d say that somebody wakes up in the morning and looks out a window at a clear sky and wishes for weather. And even if the weather doesn’t come, it is enough to start a rumor about it to make it real for people. + That…

When Magda was fourteen, she married her father. The ceremony was simple, packages of crepe paper and party favors tossed carelessly about the living room. She wore her sister’s white prom dress and her father wore a faded gray tuxedo from his college days. Her mother married them in a flowered sheet draped over her…

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…