Here is the house. Its siding contains asbestos. Its paint contains lead. This is what we were told every time we got caught sneaking out the window in the middle of the night. As if disease and

"Sometimes things aren't supposed to change," Billy would say, lying in bed while rubbing my back, when we got to talking about the town, about how unfortunate it all was, how opportunity had gone

We were just out of Williams driving to Flagstaff in the dead of winter in the dead of night when one of us, the driver, shouted the rest of us awake and said he just saw one honker of an elk in

There was no place to get it on.

There are bulky strange men in the kitchen, they are laying new black and white tile. It is daylight out, so that limits the possibilities. The proximity of

The unruly ferns creeping over the porch of the grand old house in Selma, Alabama, didn't fool Allie. Nor the lacy vines hugging the walls and roof. Old money. Unlike the transience of bungalow

The Living Room

This is where we watch TV, where we entertain guests and let them add to the walls. You can see some of the words from the last dinner party on the ceiling if you look

My son thinks he's French.

His accent was cute at first, but it's starting to get on my nerves. If he asks for another glass of Beaujolais I'm gonna go to jail for child abuse.

Yesterday, I

It takes a lot to get me to read an entire book. I buy, borrow and steal books by the hundreds, but the actual number I read from beginning to end are very few. In the last seven years, I've

C.J. Hribal (a.k.a. – Juice Hardball) is a stone cold baseball freak. The kind of guy who can tell you who played third base for Cincinnati in 1990*, or who was commissioner when the designated

Cory glares at me across the room. His left eye is swollen and purple. If you look closely you can see his veins throb as they pump blood to his stupid, beedy-eyed, cat's asshole of a face.

His

If the game of baseball is a narrative in numbers, try this one on for size: on Saturday March 30, 2008, 115,300 people showed up at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for an exhibition game between the

I Telltale
My dad still has the lanky, deceptively thin frame typical of most pitchers, with long, gibbon-like arms – he is 6'2' but wears 37' shirt sleeves, giving him the reach of a man four

I've seen em all.

The pretty boys with all the talent and not an ounce of sack.

The Latinos so flashy they trick you into thinking they're good.

The fake hustlers who got everybody

When I was a kid, my dad took me to a Mets game at Shea on my birthday. I remember walking up the ramps and looking outside the stadium, past the corrugated blue and orange panels that hung

A friend once told me a story about a kid he'd known who played right field and caught flies. Not fly balls – this kid hated Little League, hated his father for making him play, was afraid of the

To the editor: 

I enjoyed your baseball preview issue but wholeheartedly disagree with your predictions for the National League East. If you look at the schedules for both the Mets and the

A swing and a miss.
And now the lone samurai
Returns to the bench.
        - Ted Weir 



Longball
The flyball skies

I had worked in a bottle factory, a bottle-top factory, a paper factory, a nut factory, a bolt factory, a clock factory, a wall factory, a door factory, a window factory, a whisky factory, a wheel

Tom had been promising for some time to take Stevie to the zoo, and today was the day. He paid their admission and the two entered the zoo grounds, passing the gift shop, built to resemble an

I wanna have cool recurring dreams, ones that'll make me sound smart when I describe them to people. Right now, I only have the same dreams everyone else has -- you know, where your teeth fall out,

Her heart swells like someone turned a faucet on. It is enormous. A fast-moving cloud of blackbirds dissipates into the trees. Or are they bats. They're at the zoo. It is the same as the bowling

7:13 

Tate found a sawbuck turtle near the metal shed. He called inside for me. I sat at the kitchen table, a napkin spread across my lap, ketchup from the bacon and egg sandwich swabbed along

After work on Fridays we'd usually go over to The Holly on 27th for a beer.

One night I'm working late so I don't get there till seven. Quigley is sitting at the bar in his usual place. I take

His name is David and he's in the hospital with a lot of things stuck in his arms, nodes pasted to his chest, tubes going into his nostrils and mouth. He has been staring at the TV for

I'm a big fan of blue. The dark, deep blues. Like that James Taylor song, deep greens and blues are the colors I choose. Green's nice, too, but I prefer blue.

Don't know if I could call it my

Up to our lunch room table came the newest, biggest loser in the ninth grade -- Intercom! We called him Intercom because he wore a big bolt-like hearing aid that, protruding from his ear, made him