When I entered the shop, the cashier looked at me like someone holding a toilet seat.

The aliens were everywhere that summer.

Every night he’d sleep next to me, grabbing my belly, my hair, my thighs like he thought I might disappear.

Even at his weight, he could still get himself down to a 40 degree angle with the ice at a speed that pushed him to vapor, when you feel dilated into thin air. That is what they called it in the New England League: pushing vapor.

That summer was like a movie or waiting for a movie to start, stuffing yourself all through the previews and when the movie came it was always a rag...
 

“To the sweet life!” Phil says.  

She combs her hair: I love her. She throws up on a Thursday after drinking at a new club spot on a Wednesday night: I love and love and love her. She spills her coffee onto the floorspace between our desks and laughs, Black Cup Down: What can I do?

“He just picked up a Nerf gun one day and shot his bottle right off the table from twenty yards out,” Dad would tell reporters, with a practiced shrug/grin combo that played well on television. “We knew he was something special then.”

The parrot's flamboyant red and blue plume cocks, shivers. The family approaches.

When I opened my eyes, I noticed something large there lying on the ground beneath a half-fallen tree.

Regarding my best self, she’s referring to yours truly, the one who keeps Michelangelo and Caravaggio from canceling each other. 

We will have an easy drunken conversation I won’t remember.

She said she made boys fall in love with her. I said I was above her manipulations but I cried when she left. When she posted pictures with other guys I felt awful. I tried not to talk to her. Her messages came less and less until finally the feeling calloused.

Let’s say you go to the beach.  And let’s say it’s on your own for the first time.  And let’s say you’re 13 and look 15.  Maybe 16.  And let’s say your mom doesn’t know you’re going alone, because Olivia was coming, but the little chickenshit went and told her mom, that stuck-up bitch from Scarsdale, who said why the hell does your father even bother paying for flute lessons? 

Once the coffee cooled I took a sip and said, Not bad for McDonald's coffee.

And he said, It really is a good cup of coffee. Wherever you go, you can always depend on McDonald's for a good cup of coffee.

And I thought, McDonald's coffee is trash.

You roamed in like a chuckling bear into my house of beakers, graduated cylinders, round bottom flasks, you asked to borrow an Erlenmeyer, here you go, I said, thought you were just a clumsy animal, afraid you'd break something of mine, pushed you out of the lab and you came back bearing M&M's in a petri dish, half of them a mess of Blue No. 2

For the better part of every year I try like heck to be a better person. Nicer. More caring. This year I’ve taken up breathing. I breathe in and I breathe out each day. Last year I learned to put less

Rome was good. Sat ninety in the summers. Leaned on his off speed when the weather got cold. Postseason, most of the district had seen him by then, we took advantage of teams whose scouts said he was

I played left field for the Tularosa Middle School Tarantulas girl’s team. I was long and brittle, like a cactus spine. Or a splinter. And I was afraid of the baseball. I batted .083 that summer and

I pick up Henry after work and we drive 65 miles to the first game of Colin’s fall AAU league. It costs enough, but college is looming and some short-term discomfort for the chance at a scholarship is

I was about to witness Kershaw’s first career no-hitter on TV when pieces of meat started to pour from the skies and slap the ground. Our house rattled as we rushed to the windows and watched the

Two things are clear to Ava: It’s time to end things with Nico, and Thad Worley might not make it out of the first inning.

He’s next to her in the left field bleachers chewing on a hang nail and

The bat was a gift from her father. It was a souvenir bat, one-of-a-kind. “This bat,” said her father, “is more than just a bat. It is a special bat, a valuable bat. It is not to be used. It is not to

She was going up to Poughkeepsie to see a girl she had met on the internet who, promisingly, shared her passion for Gary Larson comics.

She opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it, starts to laugh. ‘I guess we're both freaks.’