I. On Hotel Rooms It is considered improper to answer the hotel phone when you are staying with him during his out-of-town work conferences. He may remind you of this, bleary-eyed at 6 a.m. on his way to a meeting, and you should nod, hold your tongue and try not to start a fight right…

Now, there were no secrets good or bad between Daddy and me, but once he got popped for that third DUI coming out of Highlands, he brought me into the family business of carcass shopping down around Seneca and Greer. There he showed me to the bloody back rooms of old gutted trailers and flyspecked…

Isaac comes out of the southwest exit of the shopping mall and there — right there in the very front row of the parking lot — is the largest pickup truck he’s ever seen. Mega cab, height-suspension, four oversized rear wheels, two front, it has one of those trays on the back for transporting dead…

There was a storm expected to come in from the west — snaps of lightning and leagues of rain pummeling down — and for that reason I’d taken Sam out for a good long walk. Without it, he’d spend the night crouched by the window in the kitchen, yelping at the phantoms of wind smoothing…

Losing that boat felt like death, felt like sand in my throat. Three years old, and my tiny boat was drifting away, green plastic in brown sea, brown sea that grew green and then blue and bluer in the distance, as all things are made more beautiful by their far-awayness. I reached after it, desperately,…

You were tired, that day. You were riding in a car with your daughter Caroline and Jay, her new husband, and they were arguing. They acted as though you weren’t there. Caroline swerved once, narrowly averting a collision. You bit your lip, you sighed, you rested your head back against the seat. The noises from…

During the spring of ’50, as the depth of his ambition ever deepened, Herman Melville requested “fifty fast writing youths as soon as humanly possible” to act as “tin buckets” in collecting “[his] torrents of thought.” This request, as such youths were easily found starving in orphanages, milling about wharves, thieving in alleyways, or plotting…

I landed an office manager position with the NYC Ballet, and moved into a studio in Greenwich Village. Feeling generous, I invited my younger sister up for the weekend. “Want to rub my nose in it, huh?” Sally said. That first night, she wanted to watch lions kill antelope and mount each other on Animal…

The old lady is probably dead already and I am doing nothing about it because I am busy resisting Klondike Bars. There are forty Klondike Bars in the freezer. They have taken every bit of my attention. They want my eyes on them. They are naked on the pole. The old lady is dying from…

For my comfort, they told me the details so I would know that my husband died quickly and painlessly. The arrow traveled through his eye socket and directly into his brain. Only one man could kill so precisely from that distance, they said. My husband was killed a year ago, three months after he started…

My boyfriend Daryl laces his sneakers at the kitchen table, pulling on the heel and double-knotting, like he’s headed to Athens or Lake Placid to bring home the gold. “You’re an elementary-school gym teacher.” I blow on my coffee. “You’re just jealous.” He shovels his cornflakes into his cavernous mouth. A dribble of milk leaks…

The silk merchant slid open the side panel on his palanquin. Has it come yet? Ohasu nodded, shivering from the cold, and she fell in at the rear of the file of attendants as the silk merchant was carried up the snow-covered hill to the gate. Kichiji had purchased this cottage for Old Master Basho,…