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.

They sent me out here to get the final two outs of the eighth inning, to be the set-up man for The Closer, to set up his rightful dominion The Save, but now instead of setting up The Save I am going to blow The Save before The Closer even gets his shot at The Save.

As the blows against each other’s ribs and the glancing strikes on their now helmetless heads escalated, I moved to get out of the dugout and pull them apart, but their father, Coach Christen, blocked the exit with a Louisville Slugger

He visited the library later that night still in his baseball gear, his eye black dancing with tears.  I'm sorry, I said, but three strikes is three strikes. His batting glove let me know he understood.

The east side of Buffalo’s shuttered windshield wiper plants wilted in rust, and hardscrabble butch lesbians screamed towards first base under a surprisingly sunny day.  It’s supposed to be a softball

The catcher will rest a hand—bare or double-weighted in leather—on the hunch of your shoulder. 

He blew smoke from a loaned cigarette back into my hair, bar rag still in his back pocket from the shift that ended two hours ago. He didn’t understand why I didn’t want him to come over. “Surrender to the stuff, baby.” 

Listen to your mother.

She of the red lipstick, the garish slash of mouth that looks like you finger-painted her to life when you were four and allowed make a mess. Her helmet of curls, tiny frozen

The funeral is over, Eliza is back at work, and she has eaten dinner at home three times now, once alone, even.

The king’s first wife went crazy and no longer obeyed him, so he sent her away.

“Mrs. Bolthuis wants you to help her with something. Ride over there and see what she wants. Homework can wait for once.”

“If you have to say you’re fine, you’re probably not,” the crow replied.

Lenore was at the cusp. I’m cusping, Percy, she rasped. Percy was unsure what to do about it. Press forward? Hang back?

Married twenty years today, Heather and Vic play that game.

They walked along the railroad somewhere in Atlanta on a cold and bitter night, the full moon above them like a yellow coin some unforgiving God had tossed far out into the galaxy. In the near

There is a crawl space in my lover’s house that his wife and children don’t know about. He likes to sing into it when he’s drunk and he’s only drunk when he’s with me.

A city wide boil advisory is still out. Brain eating amoebas were detected in the tap.

Q-tips were her guilty pleasure. She loved the feel of them caressing her inner ear, reaching the itch she could otherwise not scratch. Even when there wasn’t a swish of water lodged within, she loved

We heard something Anglo, unhinged, too human. We’d been hoping for Shrimp killing Cow or Cow killing Shrimp, but it was you, Bitcha, flailing and teetering about in the night sky.

Toward the end, when heart disease had already taken my father, and my mother was alone—which she found intolerable—her doctors felt she had dementia. But I knew that was not the case. She had always

She had us trade cardigans. She said it was an exercise in empathy. 

If you get this far, that means that things are all, more or less, going according to plan.

He was in love with his friend Faye, had known her since elementary school.

I was only doing what she asked:  Not listening.