Greg listened to hold music while rereading the suicide note.

I told him about Nebraska and how it was a dried up ancient ocean bed, how farmers harvested corn and clicks, how there might be kings buried under the freshly tilled soil or angels who dusted the August crops.

When the ground thaws and the air grows thin, the boys come crawling out of the valley to your doorstep at the foot of Mount Rose.

Had I broken a vase, it wouldn’t be as bad. Events like that are outside of reasonable control. Anybody can slip and trip over a vase.

 It was weird seeing him without a hair wrap, without roller blades, his uniform in college, weird seeing him instead in a pastel button-up.

We’d read in a tour book that the Moscow clubs had shoe and face policies, which meant your shoes had to be killer and your face had to be hot...

Coco with hairs between her eyes she had me pluck sometimes at sleepovers, and eyes that opened me up like I needed fixing.

Shaving his neck to impress...

She imagined walking barefoot across the grass in the backyard, sitting in the hammock and reading that book her teacher from graduate school had published.

The landscape was a flat dimension, no mountains or hills. Farmland and ramshackle homes that looked like collages, you could see the years in them.

She looks away but can’t get the photo out of her mind, like gazing at the sun, an electric blotch.

I saw her in front of us then, and she struck me: white parka down to mid-calf meeting white Ugg boots, white hood drawn over head.

Usually I’d just as soon look away from cruelty, but Lemuel flung that chicken square at my face and my first instinct was to swat her, fretting her clipped wings and shrieking like a raspy old woman, down on the heads of the others. Simple reflex.

But here, in the house at the edge of the ocean, there is no camera, and so Mrs. Brody awaits her lover. 

We laughed when he called it a “Shake-n-Bake,” but then looked nervously around the room; the crew veterans weren’t laughing.

Charlie would never cannibalize me; he’d have nothing to eat. 

I posted a picture of my rarely used kayak on Facebook late at night.

A New Year’s resolution that I wasn’t going to do this anymore, soon broken.

A Valentine’s Day spent alone, while you were where you were supposed to be.

A summer weekend in the Hamptons, the

This is the Santa crushing it on Etsy.

This is the Santa denied unemployment.

This is the Santa whose Zoom background brought his therapist to tears.

This Santa doesn’t give a shit—he’s a

First, I visited my father’s house. After I returned home, my mother asked me to bring her there in the dark of night. We got on the highway, drove north, then took the second exit, but that was all I

I’m now constructing a mental pool for how long these two can keep up the corporate veneer before they go insane or at least pop Gene in the teeth or at least say Okay you’re done no more pineapple and then whisk away the tray of pineapple Mom and I have not stopped noshing and ogling and noshing...

Once, during practice, I shot the most beautiful double-leg on my best friend and jackhammered us both into the mat, eyes swimming in twilight.

There’s always a man, somewhere, taking out the trash, his light blue jeans rolled above his ankles; waving at his elderly neighbor watering her tomato plants; picking up the morning paper and

“Here’s the thing. You can’t be doing this. You’re 38 years old. You’re a compulsive liar. You have cavernous molars. And you’re already being tailed by the police.”

It was late, and he’d roll out of the parking lot and speed down the hill, sliding through winding backstreets with no streetlights, careening all over the road like he thought us coming face-to-face with death would make me feel better about working at Walmart.