You never could get used to waking up early, flipping to HBO, and grinding out a few miles on the treadmill. You enjoyed your shoes pounding gravel, liked seeing trees and faces. You needed your mornings peaceful. “Use your head,” I said more than once about you running at night. You wouldn’t work out during…

1. Loosely Based On Us When we were in writing school, Violet and I decided one of the fiction writers had the biggest dick, and the poets who wrote about love would be best at going down. I said the ones who wrote about soup rain and mouths that looked like blackboards would be best…

I had a baby. “Why’d you have to have a baby?” Denny wanted to know. “There are so many babies on this block already. You know this neighborhood’s really changing. First the Starbucks and then we got a Gap.” + I had a baby. “I heard you had a baby,” Ellen said. “Mina Denelsky also…

We noticed it first — we, who I like to think of as the extremely sensitive people, the ones endowed with an unpleasant aptitude for sinking to the very floorboards of despair and feeling the pulses of ugly truth that surge underneath them. I carry splinters in both my palms, and I’ve sniffed the traces…

To Courtney, being even remotely cognizant of the possibility of one’s obsessive compulsive disorder seemed an indicator of obsessive compulsive disorder. She thinks she has obsessive compulsive disorder but doesn’t. Or at least she thinks she doesn’t. It was probably just loneliness, a way to count away the time. Matt has hair all over his…

Eddie and Kate climb over a guardrail. A narrow trail descends through huge dripping ferns. Strange smells – smoke, sewage, steak sauce – float between the trees. The trail opens onto a stony cove. Beyond it there’s a green glacial lake, then luminous blue slopes, distant, cut by trenches of snow. The far shoreline is…

I suffer a reversed vanity. Clinical tendency to tend to every detail of how I prefer to be seen, which is not at all. Even by myself. If forced to glimpse my own face? I do so eyes closed. I can’t bare anything more than faint outline of lips or arched brown stretched across the…

When the shells hit the zoo five hundred exotic species spurted like awkward pollen and scattered all across the tan streets and plumbing-covered roofs of Baghdad. The leopards ran for the Tigris. An elephant wandered into the middle of the intersection where I sat in the turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, praying to the…