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

Carl Harlon had a singular, stunning thought as he balanced himself against the carnival’s bright orange plastic storm fence: she is breaking my heart. He watched as she made her way through the

Rueben, since he is on acid and can do things like that, brings Venus right out of the painting that hangs in the bathroom at the organic café. Venus steps out and steps back in, several times, her

First he was on top and then she was on top and then he bent her over a chair and then she sat on the chair and pulled his head down. Then he was on top again and she pressed her feet into his back

I should put you on the plane. The plane you’ll take to the bus you’ll take to the car you’ll drive home. I should put you on that plane. 

Instead, I take you to the train. But the train does

I. The Way There
 

On the way there you notice the light again, the same light you’ve noticed ever since you got here, a light that seems stronger than light you’ve seen elsewhere, as though

She found me at the public auction house, a placard reading "613" displayed over my head. A jeweled egg hung from her left shoulder, crusted with rubies, diamonds, glinty stuff. "So what's your

Sometimes there is a freight train stopped on the tracks. The tracks split the town, dividing it into one half and the other. On the one side, there is school. On the other, there is the little

The honeymoon suite in the bed and breakfast had a Harley-Davidson theme. When the brochure said ‘a haven for bikers,’ we assumed Schwinn. Cycling was part of our life – Mason had done the Tour

Thurleen’s feet hurt. And her head hurt from Parmalee’s algebra homework. Her eyes hurt because she didn’t have the money to replace her glasses. Her heart hurt because Roy never said the three