All the voices coming from the holes in the ground were talking to themselves, sometimes shushing themselves, too. They were hiding from the Bully, the one that got Popcorn. more »

I’m in the car with my childhood sweetheart. We’re lost on hometown streets, houses lined up like headstones. more »

She makes a dismissive flick with her hand toward the tunnel. I go. I want to communicate with chemicals, understand attraction and terror as smells. There is no algorithm here, no easy pattern of pheromones to follow. more »

We exfoliated frantically in a vain attempt to eliminate every shred of skin we'd worn before you left. This was Snake's idea. He left hollow, papery shells of himself draped down the stairs like forgotten streamers. I exhausted three loofahs. more »

I earned an A in physics. Did the tiger attack you or did you attack the tiger? It wasn’t me, Officer. He wore cutoffs on the first date. I married him anyway. more »

My mother’s made of plastic. All her parts. In her, one stores solids, fluids, leftovers, even garbage. more »

That night around the fire, after she’d coughed up more water than he thought could fit in a person’s lungs, Manuelo sat and listened to her talk about a white tunnel of light and her life flashing before her eyes—clichés, yes, she said, but true. more »

The room is small in its warmth. I feel swollen in the dim glow of a low fire and a sputtering candle. I am alone, save for my son. more »

"Give me my blowgun," Harry said. Kyle handed him the blowgun from the floor on his side. It was dark and cool and we were on a county road sixty miles east of Dallas. The sky was autumn clear; a quarter moon hung low on the horizon. more »

Meteors are drifting down through alien skies. My eyes wander up from the curbside, over the hair and heads of my friends. more »

The third reader on my thesis committee is an albino crocodile. With his white skin and liquid red eyes, Dr. Croc, Ph.D. would make a nice pair of boots or a stylish suitcase for a rich, fat Texan. more »

If you wanna see how ugly rich people really be, then go ahead, baby. If you wanna deal with drug-addicted movie stars and suits, divas and teenagers tryin' to front some Gatsby shit, then go ahead, baby. I ain't gonna stop you, but they is, and when they do, change gonna come. more »

They’ll wander the streets with rusted saws, desperate for volunteers to be divided and, after applause, made whole again. But all belief in magic will suddenly cease along with the necessity for three square meals and conversations about the moon. more »

"Who said you could have ice cream?" He picks up Johnny and carries him to the porch and squirts him hard with the waterhose. Johnny's skin shakes and turns red and his shoe falls off, he screams but gets quiet when his father covers his mouth and carries him into the house. I pick the dirty sneaker out of a puddle and bring it home. more »

Come on out, now, and let’s talk about this rationally. I know I frightened you. I’m sorry. If you would just open the door and let me explain. Well, in all fairness, I did ask you not to look in… more »

I had, I will admit it only to myself, wanted Cassidy to have a different father. I had wanted Cassidy’s mother not to be a mother. But in my defense, I had also wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t think those things, who didn’t judge. And if all that was not a possibility, I had wanted to participate in the formation of a new world where fathers at least would not have to be out of town so much to buy diapers and have health insurance. more »

Lester ran out after him, still in his slippers and vest, and I followed with flour all over my apron and quilted mitts covering my hands. We ran down the hill past the winter wheat field and threshers at work in the barn, through a cloud of their chaff that made Lester cough, and past three small boys hanging high in a tree while a girl watched them from down below. more »

Sometimes, late at night, when I’m browsing the thousand or more books on the shelves in my father’s study, I can hear them, the books, calling out to me. “Oh! Oh!” they say. “Pick me! Pick me!” And no matter… more »

When the bulldozer was reaching for the wall with his Shah Rukh Khan poster, Nelo made a rush toward it but was held back by his mother. His tiny fingers hadn’t been able to rescue it from the bare brick. They tore it down with one push. more »

This is the smell of prosperity and doom where fat wooden canneries perch on rocks hungry in fog and cold and damp and metal. And when the boats chug in, thudding heavy from squirming weight, the rust pipe organs shriek trills of C sharp, and the workers come down the hills in oil cloth aprons, rubber boots and hair-nets, some wearing lipstick, some in rainbows of kerchiefs, some laughing, some still tired, already numb. For most, this is the street where America begins in calloused hands and... more »