Antarctica wants you dead.

The research scientists bundle you up in outside-resistant clothing and put you outside the insulated walls of the research station. Your feet sink into the dry white

She had different stories for different people.

“Lost it in a hunting accident.”

“Shot off in the war.”

“Born without it.”

“Bandsaw.”

“Woodchipper.”

“Gangrene.”

Each

“I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.” 

-- Anton Chekhov

“When I dance, the stage shakes with my weight.

Betty crossed her yard and our street and my yard holding a bundle of mail.

The Light Bulb

Man did not get the idea for the light bulb from those cartoons when someone gets an idea.

Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe’s last words were not

It’s called The Panda Barn, where you can go and it’ll just be rows and rows of beds

I snapped back into it at the bar. I’d been there the whole time, of course, but I hadn’t really acknowledged it, and I took in the room and the situation like crawling out of a ditch. Billy was

The Day Shirley Temple Died

I remembered I was a bad mother. I called up my son, a bellboy in a fancy Las Vegas hotel, I wanted to apologize, patch things up. Redemption is a thing I believe

 We believed something together, and when we believed it, it was true. Nothing else more true.

I sat in my chair and stared at her. 

It was obvious to me that you needed to talk, and I was there to listen and record.

1.

In the middle of our city are the woods, which are full of animals.

Kara asks: “How much further, Marcus? Do you remember?”

"Quiet."

I don't remember. The woods get bigger each

Architecturally, it is almost an exact replica of the Indonesian-style villa he had constructed on the Caribbean island of Mustique in the late 80s; the original, with its layered streams and koi

The posse gutted your daddy’s cattle and made your little sister gasp until she made no sounds at all.  They lit cigars off the flames of your mother’s head and tied your daddy’s neck to a horse. 

You Think You Can Stop Me??

You can’t stop me. 

So they don’t let me bring my cooler no more, big deal.  I’ll go to my truck.  Cold beers in my truck, my personal space.  Right there in the

I'm giving up cold turkey for lent.

* * *

The shuffling of their feet wakes you ask they sneak into your stable at night. These are the biker boys, the popular boys in

Two outs to go in the season, eight-nothing Huskies, it’s been a swinging party and nobody invited the Mats. Now Mould’s on the mound to close it out, he’s just been unhittable all year. A lot of

François was working on a baseball campaign, the design and effects for it, two thirty second spots and a sixty, and fifteens cut down from the thirties. The director and his producer, on the couch

Three people had died on the rollercoaster, each decapitated by a wooden plank. He told her this as the lap bar lowered over them and locked. “Their ghosts haunt the tunnel,” he said, and the

A trashbag-blue tattoo of a spider stained her left big toe. D-O-O-M read the tops of her other four toes. She had a taste for chicken nuggets and cocaine and never showed initiative. “Assessory”

Recently I came across a paper I wrote in college at the prestigious University of Florida in 1999 about vengeful ghosts.

They all felt it when the house moved, but only Mae made a sound, something small and guttural, something involuntary and low.

The air in the bedroom sags with mist that won’t touch anything. It hangs around the built-in bed, and stationary lamp, and my sisters and Ma. I can’t be in there. The noises are terrible, and the haze smells like evergreens. It makes me homesick.

Mother is sitting in the kitchen with the Bible and a fresh stack of paper. A cigarette smokes in the ashtray and the sink is full of dishes. “It’s not what you think,” I whisper to the boy I have brought home. Later I will suck his thoughts dry. 

Family Album, Romance and Circumstantial Evidence