Across the street, I see a large, jolly-looking man with a white beard and white hair leaving the house of our friends, David and Shelby. The man is wearing camouflage – the jacket, hat and hip waders of a duck hunter.

At nearly two in the morning, in the room across the hall from where his wife slept, Geoff Devine was awake, gazing down at the above ground pool in the backyard. Though he couldn’t see it, he knew that within the giant wooden drum, the murky water reflected the light of the moon. 

When I was fourteen my mother moved into an apartment across town with my principal, Mr. Lorenzo, who was rumored to keep a pistol strapped beneath his dress slacks. My younger sister, Caroline,

In jest you call for your horse, but there is no horse. It’s a bright lettuce-green morning, birds piping overhead. You are on foot, and follow the derelict tracks out of town past the Shell Station.  You step off the road and onto a furry plain of high golden weeds and yellow dross. This is strange. 

It only glows if I believe in God. Of course, the Fat Man doesn’t know that. Once an hour he comes into the barn waving his short black club, threatening to cut off my carrot supply. I sulk into

Lyle worked the night shift in a millwork factory, manning a machine nicknamed the Pincher.  Everyone hated the Pincher.  On the day shift they kept going through operators.  Before Lyle, the longest anyone else had lasted on the Pincher was two years.  At least that was how the story went.  Lyle hated the Pincher too, but he’d learned to live with it.  He’d been there nine years and would be there another nine if they let him.  By then he’d have enough saved up for a nice house, one with stairs and a workbench and actual carpeting. 

100k

He said that he got a letter from a used car dealership that said that he either won 100k or a grill. He said he knew it was bullshit and he would come over, but he had to leave in the

Two queens walk out of a bar and light a cigarette, me and Lucy Littlefist. Lucy says this. She says, “In a relationship,” she traces quotation marks in the air around the word, “one of you always loves the other more.” And she’s right. She secures her wig with another bobby pin, pulls at her sequined dress. 

“Everything I touch,” he said, twirling his fork in a plate of linguini, “turns to mold.” 

There was once a time when my aunt and uncle had room enough to take us the odd weekends our parents were on vacation. Their house was smaller than ours and I felt haughty in it. The walls were dark and the air smelled musty. In the afternoons dust poured in the air like cigarette smoke in an old black and white movie. Going out into the sun was blinding. 

Hanging panties like cat skin, or Books of Dead and leaving in nighties. The jambs are so low. Lights on high are anything but warm. That pipe is what we think it might be: lost focus. He just

Cops come and take Hannah s Dad away this morning, throw him in the back of a car and yelling and screaming at him the whole time like he done left the ice cream out all day.

Win wasn't homeless, which set him apart from the others. But he'd hit rock-bottom, jobless and sharing enough to be one among them. In the fifty-station clinic, they were strapped to centrifuge

We’d been running longer than my memory. Our path was never obstructed, a well-worn corridor. Parallel walls of thorn-thick foliage kept us contained. 

I like to believe it started with her grandfather’s blessing and a bottle of spray paint—even though it might not have. 

And in the winter I traveled by ship to a land of copper domes and cobble roads, of shops glowing beyond frosted windows, of lampposts capped with mounds of snow, where I fell in love with a girl with an abnormal face. 

Because I can tell it's going to be a crappy day at work I dress up as Virgin Mary with my blue silk dress and white head scarf and lemon drop halo that got coffee spilled on it so it's a little warped, but it will do for one day of selling shoes.

When Ettore was a boy, he dreamed of puppets hovering over his bed. 

What came next was one long show: broken strings, smashed microphones, guitar solos without boundaries or purpose, house parties with bands in the kitchen and bands in the attic, missing kick drum pedals, stolen snares, songs we couldn’t figure out how to end and we drifted inside them, lost within our own imaginations.

Z’s phone rang. He picked it up and said hello. The person on the other end asked if he was Dr. Schlesinger. After a pause, Z said, “Yes, this is he.” 

That statement, of course, being a lie. 

“Hello ma’am. I presume you are the lady of the house. Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Mr. Basal and I believe that I have something you’ve lost – something you’d like to get back,” he

White light from the television brought me here.

Everything in this store is very far away from everything else in this store.

I pass razors and products containing ephedrine or

Day one, just a few hours in, and the first scratches from his insides, just a little suggestion: only a nibble.  He tries to kill the animal stuck there by gulping down water, by dousing it with

Many young novelists have been gravitating toward a movement known as the “Real Newism.” Adherents of the Real Newism assert that effective fiction requires “experiencing events.” And today, you

Buckhorn Golf Course

36 FM 473, Comfort, TX 78013

4 out of 5 stars

This place is a real gem. Just imagine the scene: The Buckhorn Golf Course opens up before you, revealing layer