Danielson sells his dirty socks to perverts on the internet. 

She’s going to be an artist, he told your parents, and he wasn’t wrong, even if you couldn’t hack it in New York. 

Mom says new husbands are like circus peanuts. They go stale after a few weeks, and she wonders, Why the hell do I keep buying these things? I don’t even like them. 

Who says islands needs water? he asked. Mine is a tree island. It’s something surrounded by something different.

“So I started collecting baseball cards.” 

Oscar kisses the child through the hard mesh fence designed for the fans’ protection.  He does not like kissing his boy through hard mesh.   

Micah turned pro and the rest of us went regular. 

While he runs, you think about how long it’s been since you stepped on a baseball field. Your chest fills up with sharp fragments of Little League afternoons, standing in left field praying for something to do and dreading it at the same time

I used to bring a six pack, pound a beer between tokens, but I’m married now and I have to get home safely.

You look like you just walked out of a punt, pass and kick contest. We gotta make you look sick."

I wanted to see Akari and have a drink so we could get a little drunk and maybe take our clothes off.

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