“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…

Your cat sits on the stairs behind an old baby gate. He’s very sick, though you swear he won’t bite. It’s more for the other cats. They’d get at him. “They’re not so nice,” you say, explaining to me the vampirism of felines, that infected blood is infected blood no matter how it’s drawn. Your…

When Otis died, the rain started falling. At first so lightly my windshield wipers squeaked even at low speed. But then the drops fattened and multiplied, and people took to hiding beneath umbrellas. I merged with gray, bought a thick slicker, and cursed my man for dying. I stopped going out. The night-and-day ting-ting-ting on…

I borrowed my brother’s clothes for cowboy night at the Red Willow Tavern. He had a nice red and white checkered shirt with triangle-shaped flaps and pearl clips and buttons. He gave me worn Lee jeans he claimed were purchased in 1984 in Long Mott, Texas. They were 33 by 33 and I had just…

We got our jobs by lies and defended our honor by night on the Hill in Saint Louis. Jimmy was thirty and I was forty and we’d met in the state pen. The foundry was hot and shitty but the pay was good and Annette at the corner bar cashed your paycheck no questions asked.…

Everything was normal on Monday. Same for Tuesday. Wednesday came and went. Thursday was just fine too. Friday happened, and all of the sudden it was Saturday. On Sundays, we eat a big breakfast of eggs and bacon and sausage and pancakes and oatmeal and jellies and coffee and juice and hash browns and onions…

On the way to the colonoscopy he says, “They’re not going to find anything I can’t outrun before I’m dead of old age anyway.” He has started the counting in earnest: My last car, my last driver’s license photo, my last census, the last probe up my ass. He could outlive all of it. Or…

“Look at the dead,” my dad said from his nest on the sofa. The bodies lay in envelopes of white cloth, some half-length, under the awning of a makeshift morgue. Their faces informed the sheets with almost-recognizable profiles. He brandished the photo before us. Mom shifted in her chair. The longer he held it, the…

We arrive, one at a time, at our Grand-Pop’s shore house. We claim rooms like it’s a free for all. Mom already has one of the master bedrooms and Dad is nowhere to be found. We don’t remember the last time we’ve all been under the same roof. Maybe it was a holiday, we think…

It was just after noon when a tall man in a dark suit rapped on Buella Dodd’s newly white washed screen door. She’d seen him coming up Standish Hill Road, making his way over the twisted and rocky path running between the trees, where the smell of mossy earth and dead leaves was strongest. He…