As a teenager, I had this superficial interest in handguns—I liked how the metal felt against my skin. I had never learned to shoot one, however, nor did I really intend to know at that young age.

The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is curiosity, so it does not surprise me when you say you are leaving for the rest of the evening to climb Mount Grablehorn or

Everyone watched him walk to the guy. Everyone saw. They were all watching with their big stupid eyes that wouldn't let anyone off the hook. And this guy, he was always on the hook. A guy who was

Jose Canseco was listening to a county music song on his portable cassette player. It was ninety-seven degrees on the public golf course. He took out a cigarette. The country music song inside his

How're you gonna live, she said, if you don't immerse?

Inside, in the unforeseen, where the sounds of dust susurrus, we glimpse rainbowed light above the shadows. Will we ever reach there, we ask?

Wonders I. Wonders we.

You stare down at the departed. The fulgurites of your heart chattering. She was, man, an episode. An emitter of staggering forked words...

My boyfriend hit me in the face with a book. It was an accident, his hitting me. He only meant to hand me the book. He meant to hand the book back to me. But my face was in its path, he said.

Maria say she gon' tell me the future. She say she know. Mama taught her, but Maria had that gift, not her mama. The real kind. She'd seen all kinds of things 'fore they happen, like her brother shot dead in that parking lot, she'd seen it all four days before it happened.

What you gon' tell me I don't already know? I say.

“We’re playing Memory Palace. It’s a medieval memory technique. If you need to remember a list of things, you pick a place that you remember well, like your childhood home or your office or your apartment, and you make a narrative...

If it hadn’t been for my day job, I never would have gone to Steve’s Shoes. I was a personal assistant to a famous actor’s wife, which meant I did the errands she didn’t want to be bothered with.

There were wolves near there. Wolves killing sheep. Poetry is dead. He thought. He could lend a hand.

Kathryn was doing all she could to get her son to touch his food again. She wanted him to eat. “I don’t know what to do,” she said to the doctor. “I don’t know what’s wrong.” The pitch of her voice

A panel of grandfathers lived in the girl like a Greek chorus. One day she woke and they were building themselves bleachers. After that they didn’t do anything. Tired, they complained. They shouted

The Platonic Man cries whenever I cry. Tears will be streaming down my face and I’ll look up and he’ll be dabbing his eyes with a cloth napkin. 

"I know why you cry,” I say at the Cuban

To London With Love

Artist: Wilhelm Blech
Album: Musicus Miscellanous; Christian Dean & Musica Immunda
Label: DNS

I am always looking outside myself for traces of the person I

At night the air waits for Cassidy the way it does for a fuse to free its load. Then the great burst air gets to be, the blues and pinks and falling greens of fleurs-de-lis the stars might have

The first time I fingered a girl, I messed it up. Of course, I didn’t realize at the time. It happened on a Friday night, at a playground. There were four of us there. Two girls, two boys. It was a very open thing. The girl who I fingered said she’d let me try, and we sent our friends to the basketball court to wait for us. 

In my mind, I had already built a Lego wall around the perimeter of the yard, tall as the Siamese twin magnolia trees I sometimes sat in...

I was in this movie. I was in this movie. I was in it. I was there. I was ripping in and out of the titles as they blinked across the screen. I was swimming through the avocado walls into the house

Jensen Beach looks back at Todd Cantrell's "Fitzhugh Falls" from Hobart January '11.

Lugging along next to me on the elliptical is an older gentleman – about the age my dad would have been – wearing two high-tech knee braces, fit with gears and everything, and what looks like an old-fashioned weight belt. He’s a regular at the fitness center, same as me. We’ve acknowledged each other on occasion and said a thing or two in the sauna, but never a real question-and-answer. I’ve always wondered about his knees.

Bad guy has no luck.  Here he is walking the aisles of the home and garden center, checking hoses for flexibility, thickness.  

When it starts to rain we cross the street. I don’t know where we’re going, but something warm and scattered is jumping underneath my skin. He leads me to the door of an apartment building, nudges me onto its small step. Then, smooth as a cloud moving across the sky, he presses his body against mine.

The Way We Sleep, an anthology of prose, comics, interviews, all about how we spend our time in and around beds was published this month by Chicago's Curbside Splendor. Currently on a "blog tour"