By the time he’d arrived at the Atwell Park Summer Solstice Festival, Bill Hannan was so high he mistook one of the paper lanterns hanging from the red-lit oak tree at the center of the park for the moon. 

This was months ago. April, maybe May. The weather was foggy. So was my brain. I saw you again in the Cubism section. I was standing in front of “The Actor” by Picasso. The second I saw you, I smiled

"You won’t let me love you, so I am loving this plant,” he says.

We do Christmas Eve at our mom’s.

People used to tell my father they looked alike, he and Bruce, and I suppose it was true.

Betty's son Jonah is convulsing in the kitchen and there are fifty ways he could die.

He tells me I have a lot of fear. He tells me I have a lot of hurt. He says someone really did a number on me, that I’m a really hurt person. 

I was in my third year of high school and I felt apocalyptic. Mine was a violent kind of nihilism. I spent a lot of time seething.

"He’s trying to tell you that he’s cool,” Jay said. “He’d probably buy us beer.”

I guess Steve felt if we were "together-together," I'd watch every film he liked, hang on his every word, which I didn't even do for my husband who wasn't passionate about anything.

She crushes up some blow with a MAC compact and does a line, her anger switching off instantly. She resurfaces on a genial plateau of euphoric haze.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t want to suffer. I love her. I love her very much. 

When Robert was small, it seemed like he didn’t quite see people. It wasn’t that he disliked people; it was just that he was more interested in igniting, with matches, small patches of grass soaked in gasoline. 

I think about her. A faint yellow light from the street falls on the floor.

When the estate agent arrived I was asleep. I thought about not letting them in. They knocked on the door three times. But I knew that my brother would be pissed if I did not let them in. So I went downstairs and opened the door.

Avez-vous trouvé tout ce que vous cherchez? the checker asks.

I murdered the cat on a Tuesday and by Wednesday morning I was back to work, saying nothing to anyone, scanning milk cartons and zucchinis and rolls of toilet paper.

Something bad happened. I sat on the bed. Tammy was under the bed but I didn’t know that. And the mattress is held up by wooden slats but the slats weren’t cut long enough, so they barely hold up the mattress and if you shift your position on the bed, there is a good chance that the slats will move out of place in the frame and the mattress will fall through the frame. And that’s what happened. The bad thing.

When she died, she just wasn’t there. I had to ask about her. She wasn’t in the usual place.

Across the vacant middle seat an old man is sleeping through all of this, chin to collarbone, neck bent at a right angle.

I forget how many jobs I got let go from and how many houses picked me up, sheets and everything, and dumped me around the corner until some other work, some other roof overhead, seemed to gather me up and dropped me hence. 

And any of the people that had been counted correctly, including me, could move or die, making the incorrect count accurate once again, if only for a moment.

I am in a storehouse of answers, am I not? I head for the reference desk even though there's no one behind the counter.

No one comes. I walk up to the bike. The seat’s taller than my bike.

I don’t smoke, I called out, but no one heard me, and I sounded uncertain.