Excerpt from the novel, Squish.

The nails on my pinky toes are just nubbins, really — sort of shapeless blobs of keratin that grow in a little pit at the end of each toe.

The boy is sprawled across the woman’s bed . . . 

She wasn’t a real pretty girl, but it was Valentine’s and a Saturday night and we had booze.

There were reports of a vagrant living in a bathhouse.

I don’t know if my husband and I are on the way to church or a hangover.

The bass line to “If I Was Your Girlfriend” curled into a smaller ball and pulled the thin blanket in tighter.

Excise it.  Use a cheese wire . . . 

My man shocked me by pulling out dirty magazines with pictures of fat black women called Black Tail. He had had the mags concealed in an oversize manila envelope.

The Germans call it the downfall. The French call it sleep. The Polish just give you vague directions.

It’s also the story of a horse, which is a word but also a kind of animal.

It was tiny, the prefab. A neat little one-room bungalow with a kitchenette along one wall and a tiny separate bathroom and the saleswoman told Greg that, in a pinch, he could move in as soon as it was delivered.

All I wanted to do was tell some jokes at an open mic and look what I had to go through. I was running for my life.

 I looked down and saw, in place of the disorder there had been, the penis and testicles of a small boy sprouting from me, growing incrementally as I ran, at about the rate of one year per second. 

Did it bother him that his only erotic recourse that evening would be to pretend masterpiece on her face? Yes. 

Katie keeps a pet duck in her Echo Park garden house. We sit on the edge of her tub and she sings, 'You are so beautiful to me,' the Joe Cocker song.

and yes, I know how everyone beats up on StevenHawking, that he doesn’t do his thinking for himself, he had one good idea and that was that

We stood there, not knowing what to do, so he lowered himself to the floor to show me how he slept.

“Don't you get cold?”

“Only when it's windy.”

“You're in Wyoming.” 

“I'll show

Babies from the Dry Counties became a fated élite. From the creamiest of breasts to organic kale pudding and Montessori kindergarten.

We were trying to figure out what a deer's home is called. A thicket? A glen?

The trouble with paddling is your arms get tired. I tell this to the girls but they don’t listen.

Call brother Henry in Louisville. Tell him to call baby sister Clementine in Augusta.

Once, all foxes were silver.

1.   It was always ice. Ice: a word like a shard of glass shived in his ribs. The dark plain he was bound to travel. His paramour, his nightmare, his lost thumb. His vice.

You are a diagnostician, alert for symptoms: ridged fingernails, yellow eye-whites, swollen knuckles, broken capillaries.