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. 

He said that Thompson could be the fastest to hit five hundred, a first ballot Hall of Famer, but I just nodded and sipped my coffee.

Take your pick. Me, they said I hung my off-speed stuff, lost track of the count, lacked mental toughness. I waved off too many signs.

The smell of grilled hot dogs is in the near distance. 

After tonight, I’ll be demoted to my parents’ couch and a job at my uncle’s lumberyard.

It tasted like apple cider — apple and something astringent — cinnamon, a strong cinnamon, warming, brown sugar, and sprinkled throughout the loaf, unadvertised, was some kind of dried fruit with a mild taste — raisins, probably — partially rehydrated by the thawing process.

My mother and father are stuck in an optic deadlock, her looking at him like she is trying to solve a puzzle or remember the name of a particular film, him looking like he’s just deciphered answers to both.

When I clock out at the end of the night my chit says I worked over 10 hours. Before I leave big brother tells me he has a great idea: walk like you need to get to the toilet. I see chef in line at a McDonalds. 

I’m on a date with this dude, the guy’s gorgeous, and ripped, skin all sunburnt like a surfer with big white teeth and confident eyes.  It’s all too sexy.  But I’m on guard.  I want to deny him but

You elaborate: Christmas just makes people emotional. "No," she says, raking at her hair with French-tipped nails. "I don't think so."

We’re riding the red line south when Xue suggests stopping in Chinatown to purchase thousand-year eggs. I picture her cracking open an enormous egg and a pterodactyl flying out.  “They’re not really a

Also, every time they flew and he had that damn backpack on, he forgot that the space he occupied extended beyond his physical back. He whacked bystanders in the shoulders or the chest, and, at least once, the face.