Jesus, I thought. Treasure. Real treasure. I didn’t say a word to the neighbor kid. All I thought about was his snot hands and my lamp. I knew what I had to do. I picked up a clump of dirt, and I thew it at his head.… more
Jesus, I thought. Treasure. Real treasure. I didn’t say a word to the neighbor kid. All I thought about was his snot hands and my lamp. I knew what I had to do. I picked up a clump of dirt, and I thew it at his head.… more
If there was ever just one bird left in the shoot, it’d get pardoned. Let out to fly away. Makes you wonder what the truly guilty do with freedom. I’ve stopped pretending I don’t feel a little crooked about everything.… more
They had all mellowed out, sitting there slumped over, eyes closed, half asleep when another car came up the avenue. This one stopped with a skid and a screech. No one noticed the color, make or model. It was dark, could have been black, blue, or even red. All they saw was the front passenger side window go down, and then Alton yelled, “Oh shit, gun!”… more
Stripe-tailed with downy head plumage, amphibian up to ankles—truncated by Reorganized Latter Day Saint knicker flannel, she claw-writes ambidextrous each time the thunder comes. They published her without knowledge—just the way she prefers.… more
When Sarah first started working at McDonald’s as a teenager, she had tried to tell her father what it was really like, how bad, and her father, who was white-haired and bitter even then, after her mother, sick of his misery, had left him, had said, “You think you got it hard? You just look at me. When you got my problems, then you can complain, understand?”… more
His eyes blinked like a machine gun’s stutter. He swirled his Chivas and mumbled something—I couldn’t hear it well over the racket of wild fucking in the bedroom. Maybe he said, “Mother would never have written that.”… more
On the ledge, the short man looked down. He felt the lonely tent behind him. In front of him, there was the storm, moving black and slow.… more
I take the handle of the vice and turn it clockwise. It’s so close to my eyes it’s out of focus. The screw turns a little and the sliding jaw presses against the left side of my head. I breathe out as much as I can in one go. I hold the nothing as long as I can before I breathe in again. It’s part of the ceremony.… more