She was what his father, who had a Betty Grable calendar in the garage, used to call a bleached blonde, and she was kind of daffy-taffy in that old Hollywood way. Face all smooth and creamsicle

The earth is deep brown and peppered with crows. Sorry-looking cows nuzzle the frozen refuge. Two mongrel dogs, skinny, tentative, sniff at my backside. Submerged concrete -- cuboid and rectangular

Gerry let out a loud belch and tried unsuccessfully to focus on Albert.

"I've got to get her back. I miss her so much."

There were tears in Gerry's eyes and Albert felt his stomach clench,

What was he thinking? Any one of us could've found it. Cards, letters, notes, and worst of all, photos. A woman -- a blonde, of all things -- who was, most definitely, not my mother.

In the

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. I'm 43. I'm sure."

"It's a big decision. It's a life."

"Don't you think I know that? I'm Catholic. I know what a life is."

"I should have worn

She had death in her hands, in her heart, in the americ tang of her angry sweat: she was jealous of a piece of bread. It was a dark, trunk-thick loaf of Polish bread, and Agnes could think of

I.

Deirdre doesn't talk to Nicole anymore, but she thinks she does. Last winter, six months went by with neither one of them saying anything. Right around Memorial Day, Deirdre asked if she

1. Ionization

In a city where everything feels a bit belated, where the clever ones agonize over looming hindsight, our advertising company accelerated toward modernity, at last, on February

Kitty peeled dead flies off the screen. She squinted in the direction of the boatyard. "No boats today," she muttered to herself.

A late season heat wave had brought a constant haze that made

Leonard Crank is an ass. He's a beer-in-a-can-drinking, White-Owl-cigar-smoking, wife-beater-wearing, greasy-haired slug. He is also my next-door neighbor. As for me, well, I have always been the

"Rita, I know you've slept with one of your cousins," Mom told me this morning at brunch.

My stomach kicked. I stopped chewing but couldn't swallow.

"Here, drink some juice," she said and

He sits in his chair, absently running his fingers through his thinning white hair. She hunches on the sofa, quivering, holding a shredded tissue in one hand and rubbing warmth into her forearm

A ticket to watch Cindy do her striptease cost a dollar and an ice cream.

Terms and conditions of business were:

1) The dollar could be paid as a bill or in loose change, but currency from

1

My father’s ashes clumped on the way to Smith Mountain Lake—it was probably the humidity. We had transferred his ashes from the urn because my mother thought the urn was ostentatious. We had

Dina stood on the edge of the platform. She liked to feel the rush of the subway as it roared past. It was midnight. She was coming from a movie about a woman who liked to photograph strangers.

The next morning, you get a call from the Days Inn Akron South and he tells you he’s been in an accident. He is unhurt but crying into your answering machine, saying that he didn’t want to call you

He smokes overhanded like a soldier. She notices that right away. He's hiding the glowing ember in the cup of his hand just like he's been taught to do. Her grandfather once told her that the

“Matsuzaka’s pitching motion is an elegant haiku, beauty captured in three parts separated by two pauses that he varies from pitch to pitch. He swings his hands over his head, pauses, lowers his

Mark took a pencil out of his royal blue gym bag. He hunted for a scrap of notebook paper, something to write on, but all he could find was a half-eaten tuna fish and potato chip sandwich, a

It's the middle of May, and the temperature has leveled off at a balmy 42 degrees at 7:30 p.m . This is why there were only about 15-20 people sitting in Section 12 -- or Section 14, or Section 22,

Outside the apartment I'm leaving, in a spread out triangle of park benches on an oversized traffic island lined around the outside with waist-high shrubs, there's a vagrant man, grayed and out of

Eadweard Muybridge invented the photographic process called stop-motion photography, his most famous a series of stills illustrating a horse at full speed. My memories of our first house near

The man wiped his mouth with a silk handkerchief embroidered with his initials ($75.- a piece). He had just finished his meal of raw sea scallop carpaccio drizzled with white truffle oil and

That day, when the nurses hugged her and welcomed her to the hospice, it all came together. Silke belonged here. She excelled in dying.

She sat up in bed all day, her fingers folded on her

1. When I was sixteen I wrote a poem that started: As the years press down, I will remember you.

2. I have no idea who I was talking about when I wrote that.

3. Which means, I guess, that I