It reminds me of the swimming pool game when I was a child, eyes closed, calling, and the others answering as I struggled, not knowing how to swim blind. I reached for their voices, their bodies
My mother is in every room of her house. The kitchen keeps her fingerprints in the flour jar, her lipstick stains on the wine glasses. She left a note on the refrigerator that says: Gone grocery
I discovered Yannick Murphy through her Bookworm interview and bought a copy of Here They Come (McSweeney's Books, 2006) soon after. I've read it twice already and know that this is a book I'll
Sex and Kindness
Rachel left Mac and walked down the dirt road next to the river. She was leaving him for good. A truck drove up. A man leaned out. She didn't look at first. When she did, she
Transportation
Come dusk the lie will prevail, and even those who know better will venture out in the belief that the evening is cool. It isn't. Welcome to ramshackle, angular Belize City. The
"I don't really know how to put it across," said the private detective.
Birds of spring flew across the bright sky behind the window of a dark office. The 50-years old woman sat down and looked
Miguel speaks Spanish and I speak Spanish and Miguel has no idea I do. He lays block while I bring block and still he has no idea. Calling me a perro. He laughs and jokes with the other migrant
Temporary People is subtitled "A Fable." What does that mean to you? And how do you think the fable adapts to long-form fiction? And one that's acutely aware of world history and politics at
ADLERIAN THEORY
A little girl in a red princess-style coat with a checkered lining, aged three. She's on tiptoe on the back seat of the Chevy, a red and white finned '57. That's what I remember
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
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 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
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,
