The first time I met Courtney, she told me she loved my ballet flats. We were wearing the same $14.99 shoes. She hated her curly hair and middle name and Democrats.

and two personal renaissances ago. You mourn for six weeks, then use her death to excuse all of your shortcomings for the rest of the year. One night, your body full of hunger and youth, you carve her

All my friends refer to my housemates as “the LCs,” short for the Lapsed Christians, because Bridget and Jeff met in Minnesota at some evangelist college where they started fucking and eventually got expelled. My friends find them fascinating.

His fullest attention. No one gets that. And here it is, steered onto me.

1. Driving east on I-94 from 8:41 to 8:55 I saw brief glimpses of beauty.

Recently, my dreams have had subtitles. But they never match the words being spoken. For instance, in the dream I’ll say, “I’ve missed you,” and the subtitles will say I DO NOT WANT THE SALAD.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said, turning to the man in the seat beside me. Though he didn’t appear to speak English, he intuited my rejection. Loneliness, like love, is an international language.

The top of Yoda’s house looked like it had been splattered with molded yogurt. There was an allure to it. Like, had he intended to paint it this odd assortment of colors, he would be proud of it.

In her dance, Chang’e waves her sleeves to disperse the surrounding mist.

He couldn’t yet do the thing he’d learned to, of establishing some authority by playfully, sweetly infantilizing her. By appealing to the equalizing, mutual infantilization of early love baby talk.

NO BOOKS, NOTES, OR ELECTRONIC DEVICES ALLOWED.

I was at a party, one of those parties where everyone is drinking heavily, like they are trying to accomplish something. Me, I was trying to calm my nerves. I don’t know what anyone else’s end goal

She took off her heavy fake fur coat and placed it on my new white Ikea chair in the corner.

What does it mean to believe?

The first dog barks. Second dog. First dog. Third dog joins in. Then a fourth. Then a cacophony and I lose track of the dogs barking in a distance, down the quiet street where my father and I have nothing left to say to one another. 

When my wife drives off without me, my first thought is that she must have made a mistake.

All the tigers met at a restaurant. In the wild, they would have hunted in isolation, but territories had gotten smaller and old cats had to learn new tricks.

I think about cataloguing all the days I feel like dying. But then I think Ivan would find the death catalog. Ivan would use it against me.

Of course there’s little difference between now and any other time, in relation to the unforeseeable aspects of tragedy taking place; it is just as likely that some improbable event occurs here in the restaurant as any other place, including the drive home, during which all it would take is a flick of the wrist from any of the countless passing strangers to change your lives.

I have seen charlatans and I have seen television ministers, and  I was beginning to get that vibe.

“But you named him Davey and my name is David. You might change it up next time.”

“I know your name,” she said.

He had a little radio, and on the mornings it snowed, he listened over and over to the lists of school closings until he knew them by heart: Kellerville area, Longstead area, Mount Holly area, all the outlying place-names, all the Our Lady of’s. Sometimes there was only a two-hour delay, and he wondered what it must be like, to have the boon of two extra hours like that.

After every funeral, we play car tag. Lift keys from our front hallways, still dressed in black skirts and skinny ties, pair into the driver and passenger seats of our parent's cars, some of us

We played in our cousin’s backyard. It was always pitcher’s hand out, right field out. If you did dish it right over the barbed wire into burdock, Queen Anne's lace, thistle, milkweed, you had to

Three boys took their positions on the makeshift field. The flagstone wall edging the upper lawn was the outfield fence. One foul line was the street, the other the edge of the woods. Joey pitched.