“This one’s kind of a dud,” he said, turning the page. “It’s fine, but I’m not sure where it goes.”
“That’s like me on this path,” she said.
“It’s really not.”

The best wrestler he'd ever seen.

You look like a zombie who’s just seen a ghost, the mirror mouthed back. 

She didn’t look mad, but she was something. She was moving slow-fast like a cat, something I’d never witnessed, like I could feel how fast she wanted to go but wasn’t going.

All around him the congregation erupted. Tears of rapture. Hugs of friendship. Compassionate embraces. Passionate kisses. Erotic caresses.

Are you in my head? Do you know what goes on up here? Do you know what’s preceded all that goes on up here? 

A tendril of smoke dissipated above us. She made an opening in her hands, revealing a little frog. Its throat pumped rapidly.

His subconscious deemed them too short, or not steep enough, or their grass was flecked with yellow and brown. He had succeeded in agitating his appetite and wondered what he would have for dinner.

People hung around outside of convenience stores with their hands over their mouths blowing smoke. Stereos played loud Christmas music.

Hank sucked what was left of his cigarette back in one pull and flicked it into the alley.  The hot light of the ember cartwheeled through the air before disappearing into the snow.

“Hm,” Yoda grunted, considering the foyer, it’s openness, how exposed he was, and what he could do about it. “Hm,” he grunted again.

He tells them, pays for the burgers and, as they drive to the mall, as if to encourage them, a general addressing his troops, he tells them about fights with broken bottles, about fighting the black kids because he was white, the Italian and Polish kids because he was Jewish, the rich kids because he was poor.

When I wasn’t on the road, I ate lunch at the diner just to watch Cathy polish the cutlery. 

Well, at least we aren't just dead, she said.  

What?

At least we aren't dead, right?

Yeah. 

When our baby arrives I am feeling a funny mix of elation and terror – what have we done?

A woman at our airport gate is eating a box of powdered donut holes and not licking her lips. She is capable of licking her lips, I know this because only after she finishes exactly three donut holes

Sometimes we’d see a slip of moon hung in velvety sky, and we’d find ourselves crying for no good reason, or maybe every reason that we could think of. 

I only get twenty bucks that day. Trevor tells me to call him next week. He'll have some more work for me. But I never see him again. Or even hear his voice. I lose him number. Greaseback is never around. And then the phone gets cut off. I'm back to where I started.

Smart girls don’t tempt the devil. I was a bullseye, a bloody Rorschach blot, walking into the prison flaunting my muleta.

About earlier, he had started to say —

— is that all you can think about, your duck?

When I was a freshman in college (many years ago, before the marriage and the children and the divorce and the loss of faith in God), I saw a man order eight McDoubles at a McDonald’s on campus and then proceed to eat them all.

While they wrote about the never-ending snowstorm in the first pages of their novel: outside of their apartment, snow began to fall.

~

It was four days into the snow, into writing their novel,

I watched Jim Johnson try to close out the 9thin front of a half-capacity Camden Yards. My father was supposed to come, but he was six blocks up at Mercy Hospital relearning to use the left side of

Old Seals Stadium is a shopping center now. It is a parking lot, a grocery store, a 24 Hour Fitness, a Ross Dress for Less, a Japanese dollar store. I get all my errands done at old Seals Stadium—all

I’m sitting on our carpet, legs crossed, beer in my crotch.