Then a spring day burns through with such clarity Melissa asks me to help her interview dog walkers at the dog park. Not the day nurse. Not the other aid. Me—our first outing since the

Before I was me, I was somebody else, the same as we all are. A human is constantly shedding skin like a snake. It’s just a metaphor.

I learned all the tricks in middle school; I learned how to

How many white girls of twelve and thirteen became the dreamed-about woman back home when I listened to Every Little Kiss by Bruce Hornsby and the Range?

“See,” I said. “We’re both nihilists.”

 “I’m not a nihilist,” Matt said. He was at the kitchen sink filling his flask.

Organic is just another word for living, but nothing here feels alive.

The shelves are stocked with discards – twist-tied bags of stale bread crusts, canned peach pits in heavy syrup, pickled ribs

For the first time ever, they were being honest about their sex lives.

In the morning, we don’t move. I’m satisfied. I’m easy to love. I’m not freezing and still drunk.

Turns out, we decided later, it was silly to try and sell flowers at all. The user experience of flowers had to be re-tooled.

You are a person who claims you’d rather die young than spend your whole long life in Kansas, but as you hit thirty, you shrink away from this ultimatum.

Throughout our first year in that house you woke feeling this ghost’s breath on your face, and at night, sometimes, you’d jump up frantic, swearing you’d felt its grave-clasp on your ankle or arm.

Somewhere in the archives of Baseball America, there’s a story by an Italian journalist named Giovanna de la something or other, and she attempts to verify, through old box scores and personal

The paper said my team (Sand Gnats) had a chance this year (second season with the new name), so I opened the fridge, opened a beer, sat down, and turned the TV on to watch the first game of the

The one and only time I ever met Ken Griffey, Jr. was at a baseball clinic.

I was hitting off a tee when he strolled up behind me. I was 12, and Junior was still in high school, a volunteer, but

It took me all morning to build the fence.  I used old lawn chairs, cardboard boxes, and rusty sign posts from the dumpster behind 7-Eleven.  I meant for it to look like Camden Yards.  The right field

Across the basement, your best friend pitches graduation balloons like they’re weightless baseballs. You swing with a curtain rod that had fallen behind the couch (your mom will ask about that

Mike and Nick and Tom are already playing stickball in the back lot when Dad drops you off at P.S. 236. On one brick wall they’ve chalked a strike zone, on the floor is a powder-blue pitcher’s mound

Bishop and I were smoking a joint on the pitcher’s mound. We drew dicks with our fingers next our school’s logo. It was mid-March, around midnight. I stopped drawing dicks and looked up at the empty

Let them do the majority of the talking. Laugh at their jokes. Ask them about their motorcycle, their new car, their recent trip to the Maldives.

She gives me a pocketknife. It has an ergonomic handle with smartly placed finger notches, a nice stainless-steel blade that folds up, a sturdy, low-riding pocket clip—perfect for those inconvenient moments you need to cut something loose.

By late August, Mary-Beth was sweating on her front porch swing, a bottle of Budweiser resting on the table her daughter Madison gave her for Mother’s Day a decade earlier. Mary-Beth had been watching

I have made my decision: I am going to set myself on fire.

It was Mr. Wexler, my old boss, who made a second me.

We preened our signatures in the cheerful attic, Owen’s royal insignia and my fallen few ants.

They said that Xianrenzhang took your heart because she didn’t have her own. She was looking for one that was just the right size, not too big and not too small, that she could slot into the cavern in her chest.

Hector loved, loved, loved having a black friend, but he could never admit it.