Mama was a truck. A Ford Bronco, to be exact.

"Six fine fish in that dirty pond! They're gonna die there anyway!" he told me. "They're gonna suffocate on all that mud."

She said: in my home, I want to feel at home. I want to feel as though I am swaddled in blanket, as though the walls pump food right to my gut. I water the plants, all seven or eight, some dying. I feed the cat

The first time I met Courtney, she told me she loved my ballet flats. We were wearing the same $14.99 shoes. She hated her curly hair and middle name and Democrats.

His fullest attention. No one gets that. And here it is, steered onto me.

1. Driving east on I-94 from 8:41 to 8:55 I saw brief glimpses of beauty.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said, turning to the man in the seat beside me. Though he didn’t appear to speak English, he intuited my rejection. Loneliness, like love, is an international language.

The top of Yoda’s house looked like it had been splattered with molded yogurt. There was an allure to it. Like, had he intended to paint it this odd assortment of colors, he would be proud of it.

In her dance, Chang’e waves her sleeves to disperse the surrounding mist.

He couldn’t yet do the thing he’d learned to, of establishing some authority by playfully, sweetly infantilizing her. By appealing to the equalizing, mutual infantilization of early love baby talk.

NO BOOKS, NOTES, OR ELECTRONIC DEVICES ALLOWED.

I was at a party, one of those parties where everyone is drinking heavily, like they are trying to accomplish something. Me, I was trying to calm my nerves. I don’t know what anyone else’s end goal

What does it mean to believe?

The first dog barks. Second dog. First dog. Third dog joins in. Then a fourth. Then a cacophony and I lose track of the dogs barking in a distance, down the quiet street where my father and I have nothing left to say to one another. 

When my wife drives off without me, my first thought is that she must have made a mistake.

Of course there’s little difference between now and any other time, in relation to the unforeseeable aspects of tragedy taking place; it is just as likely that some improbable event occurs here in the restaurant as any other place, including the drive home, during which all it would take is a flick of the wrist from any of the countless passing strangers to change your lives.

I have seen charlatans and I have seen television ministers, and  I was beginning to get that vibe.

“But you named him Davey and my name is David. You might change it up next time.”

“I know your name,” she said.

We played in our cousin’s backyard. It was always pitcher’s hand out, right field out. If you did dish it right over the barbed wire into burdock, Queen Anne's lace, thistle, milkweed, you had to

Three boys took their positions on the makeshift field. The flagstone wall edging the upper lawn was the outfield fence. One foul line was the street, the other the edge of the woods. Joey pitched.

As the blows against each other’s ribs and the glancing strikes on their now helmetless heads escalated, I moved to get out of the dugout and pull them apart, but their father, Coach Christen, blocked the exit with a Louisville Slugger

He visited the library later that night still in his baseball gear, his eye black dancing with tears.  I'm sorry, I said, but three strikes is three strikes. His batting glove let me know he understood.

He blew smoke from a loaned cigarette back into my hair, bar rag still in his back pocket from the shift that ended two hours ago. He didn’t understand why I didn’t want him to come over. “Surrender to the stuff, baby.” 

The funeral is over, Eliza is back at work, and she has eaten dinner at home three times now, once alone, even.

The king’s first wife went crazy and no longer obeyed him, so he sent her away.