The parents come home tired, they come home smiling, they come home angry, they come home drunk.

Shane said I needed to be more social, network with the other teachers. I told him it was pointless.

He can’t respond to the man addressing him as Mr. Sport because he can’t talk, his tongue has been mangled, somewhat ineptly, and he sees the hilarity in this, being tortured by inept torturers, as another larger silent gentleman’s behind him, but if it weren’t him in the chair, if it were someone else and he was watching, he might be amused by these two dilettantes practicing the art of torture.

The woman sat on the train wrapped tightly in her coat. She stared at herself in the window and eyed the other passengers.

My therapist’s name was Sean. I remember that most of all because it was easy for me to say. The sound sh never caused trouble. I could curse or tell people to shut up all day long. But es caused a world of trouble. 

The fact of his wariness stops her; Viv gathers the remaining clumps of her hamburger, squeezes them between her fingers but no juice comes out. She stares at the clumps. 

No good relationship, if you could call it that, ever started in a bar.

I remember Ian saying I was not a novelist and I think, as much as it pained me at the time to hear this, he was correct.

I will watch you kill the cat.

She picks a bony honeysuckle blossom off the bush and sticks the stem under the elastic of her bathing suit bottom.

He stands so close I can make out the threads on his polo shirt.

She can't remember the important bad things. I ask her about the divorces and the dead dogs buried in the woods and the cracks in the bathroom tile and the negative, blood red balance in her checking account and her eyes go blank and she shakes her head like she's been overcome by some faint neurological chill. 

“They were getting ‘the talk,’” Carmen says, pausing dramatically, “and in walks a huge nurse wearing a robe.”

Looking back, the efforts we made were desperate. We took walks. In bed, he fed me grapes; chilled, out of the refrigerator. We took weekends off work, spending money in small towns where there was

My perverse compassion had destroyed all traces of a once-in-a-lifetime trip. 

Do you remember everything I said last night? she asked. 

You mean do I remember you crying and saying you loved me?

She needs a quick blowout, so I comb and press her golden hair until is a sheer curtain fluttering around a face thrown open to love.

“I love watching you get dressed.”

“More than you love watching me undress?”

When I am not exercising or performing space walks or cleaning or developing vehicle software, I watch the sun rise 16 times a day.

Standing in the kitchen the other day, out of nowhere I became disoriented and unsure of where I stood.

This guy’s old school, Roselli says to me over the phone, real old school. How old school can you be, I’m thinking, in a sport that’s already run its course in just a few years.

Everyone picks the chairs up and puts them in a circle. Then they turn the music on and you start to walk along the perimeter.

My family’s eponymous foundation is a donor to Columbia University, in whose MFA program in Creative Writing I was enrolled, but due to some substance abuse problems last semester, I had to drop out . . .

Violette moved away from Calvin toward a group of rhododendrons.

Calvin felt calm.

He thought about God.

I didn’t ask why you spent all that time and energy making a hole with all the wrong tools instead of calling the landlord.