Is there anything more adorable than a drunk toddler? I don’t mean a slurring, stumbling, falling down, cursing toddler, though we often enough found ourselves in that state, but an evenly buzzed toddler, whose mother can offset whiskey intake with soothing butter, maintaining her toddler’s perfect, moderate drunkenness.

Another family story. I can’t get away from it. As Easter approaches, I find myself thinking about one of my aunts who, when it... more

If Conlon wasn’t busy composing music for the player piano, he spent his time mulling over cryptic scenarios that provoked his interest; for instance, how a boat made out of paper illustrated to resemble wood looks like a boat made out of wood.

She glances into a pocket mirror. She is WIFE now. She doesn’t need to go through her lines, she’s been doing this for years.

Michele Lee woos my husband through the screen and also through the decades.

The Professional felt the rush of consciousness, the quick awakening that could only mean another person with questions. Another intransigent... more

Junior is not getting out of his car.

It’s January in Ohio, and he has just driven all night from Florida. This car—a 1991 Nissan... more

“But what if it isn’t broken? What if this is the way it’s supposed to be? Like, a new challenge that keeps things interesting. Something unexplainable that helps.”

Every time our son comes to the plate, I hold my breath.

They are the junk-baller, the relic, the trickster, the reinvention, the resurrection. A synonym for “reliever” could be “healer.”

Nobody could be quite certain where it started, but Mr. Met was the first anyone noticed.

You could tell Heather was a catcher by looking at her thighs, but she brought an infielder's mitt to the game that day.

The birds lift their blue feet in a slow and deliberate seduction. 

Gravity bends light. Gravitational attraction between masses results in a warping of space and time.

Jake from State Farm hangs up the phone and hustles to the bathroom.

Excerpt from the novel, Squish.

The nails on my pinky toes are just nubbins, really — sort of shapeless blobs of keratin that grow in a little pit at the end of each toe.

The boy is sprawled across the woman’s bed . . . 

She wasn’t a real pretty girl, but it was Valentine’s and a Saturday night and we had booze.

There were reports of a vagrant living in a bathhouse.

I don’t know if my husband and I are on the way to church or a hangover.

The bass line to “If I Was Your Girlfriend” curled into a smaller ball and pulled the thin blanket in tighter.

then I see her standing there in the corner of the place all by herself 

Excise it.  Use a cheese wire . . . 

My man shocked me by pulling out dirty magazines with pictures of fat black women called Black Tail. He had had the mags concealed in an oversize manila envelope.