After the funeral, Dakota drove straight to the airport; there was nowhere else to go. Her brother was the only remaining soul in the Rocky Mountains she’d known.

There’s hardly anywhere like Norton’s anymore, and no one like Norton. He sold phrases for special occasions out of a shop in Queens.

Chesterfield knocked with two eczematous knuckles—only a courtesy warning to let her know he was coming on in. This time he walked into a locked door.

Sarah squeezed into a bathroom stall with Ralph. Outside her boyfriend sat at the bar, nursing yet another domestic beer.

Hector was lucky and he knew it. And everyone else knew it too.

He wasn’t expecting how strong they’d be with their pale soft hands and their petticoats and their bowties and their cummerbunds. But when they stormed the ship, they threw aside lacy parasols and let fall monoculars.

Sometimes the two memories grow conflated in her thoughts, especially in her dreams.

She almost said yes until she saw the stain.

Scrawled across the garage door in big red letters are the words "Die Snake!" 

Aimee looks back to how things were.

Nighttime near Fort Jesus.  We point our phones heavenward and hear about the latest rave death.

The killer dispatched the boyfriend easily in the kitchen, and then he had an idea.

This was a painstaking choreography of getting whacked in the balls.

The one and only time I saw Herman French naked was when he was toweling off after a shower.  Herman was my bunkmate two years ago at Camp Thunderbird.  He had the smallest penis I’d ever seen. 

Maybe I dropped it as I struggle to hold the box of Munchkin donuts and the lukewarm cup of coffee in my hands that I brought for you. Even after you told me not to. Even after you told me you needed space.

I couldn’t sleep when we shared a bed anyway, so most nights, when he was deep enough, I wriggled out of his armpit to lay on the floor, play Pokémon until sunrise caught on spots in the window.

I start with which would you rather as an opportunity to open up the conversation for a set piece I've prepared. In summer I might ask how does everyone like their air.

Dan got an associate’s degree in business, works for a bank and still deals a little dope on the side. Moss sells high-end real estate in the city. Spence moved to Brooklyn for the music and he’s got an EP on Bandcamp that’s pretty damned good. I’m the only one who stayed in town.

We are the high school hallwalkers, the frequent fliers, the do not admit until disciplinary list, the back of the class, the front of the class where I can keep my eye on you, the laughing and fighting and nodding off 

i took a girl to a donut shop after an art show

i bought her a donut and milk and then we sat in my car

we talked and ate donuts

she said she had thanksgiving dinner with a guy who shot two cops

Pizza Hut pays for my gas, and of course I eat for free whenever I get to one of our restaurants. They allow me fifty a day for lodging, but since we’re saving for that patio set I usually just sleep in the car if the room is over forty. In Iowa City it was hard to find something that cheap but Missouri is like motel central! 

six years later and I only know how to be needed

“The organism is made to self-regenerate,” she said as we walked to my 1980 Buick in the gravel lot.  “In this way it is unlike worn-out horses and old-ass cars.”

I am thinking about the lungfish’s two worlds—the wet one and the dry one—and about metamorphosis.  And I am thinking about strokes—about whether it’s the moment that the arm becomes weak that a person’s life goes into pause.  Or the moment that the blind spot sets in.

Latvia’s Baltic coastline is almost completely undeveloped except for a few fishing villages and some dilapidated concrete resorts for Communist Party officials.  A forest of black pines begins right at the edge of sixty-foot dunes.