Jerry’s Daddy, looking half dead, sat in the kitchen smoking a Camel and sketching comic faces on a napkin with a stubby pencil. There was quite an odor about him, mostly of sour, poorly washed

Jesse come in from the spot across the way where Daddy had him throw the last of the matchboxes. Daddy let Jesse carry em cause they was light, and Jesse liked helpin. Jesse counted 38 full trash

When we arrived at our new place on Plankton, the first thing I noticed was all the cages in the neighbor’s yard. Rows and rows of wooden crates, stacked on end, lined their yard, the wire netting

Greg had always suspected that had Hitler managed to get into art school, he would have become the Thomas Kinkade of his time. Did it follow then that had Thomas Kinkade not found commercial

“They paved paradise / and put up a parking lot / which was a public
  necessity / that boosted the economy / of the city and surrounding towns.”

- - -

Fact: Jim Bogios used to

This was a burlesque theater, a two-bit operation that could barely pay off the racketeers and the cops  a place to come into out of the dark, although in the end the dark could snag you by the

When the governor’s budget cuts hit Eisenhower Middle School, the library’s one of the first targets because who needs books? The staff is halved. I’m cut; Joan’s kept. She has nineteen years in

The next morning the phone rings early, five-thirty, definitely not later than six. The birds outside don’t scream that loud after six. The voice on the phone is my niece, the fifteen-year-old,

There’s been a lot of talk about Executives in the news lately, a lot of mystery and confusion. For the last year, I’ve had a side-gig proofreading executive resumes. Now I know all about

LAKE ELSINORE WILL HOST THE ONE TRICK PONY

This place was one of those places. Had a minor league baseball team, an Angels affiliate, on some high ground, halfway between Riverside and

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