Breaking Wallace Goldberg’s nose for being constantly late on the juice. Or the time I took a sledgehammer to Dennis Quinn’s legs and left him in an open grave in St. Anthony’s Cemetery. That’s as much as she knows about me.… More

Breaking Wallace Goldberg’s nose for being constantly late on the juice. Or the time I took a sledgehammer to Dennis Quinn’s legs and left him in an open grave in St. Anthony’s Cemetery. That’s as much as she knows about me.… More

My momma always told me, “Son,”—that’s how I knew she was talkin’ to me. She’d say, “Son, you ain’t no good.” No sugar, no salt—but somehow almost sweet as warm honey apple pie, fresh from the oven. “Now, it ain’t your fault. See, your daddy was no good either.”… More
Dead men, dead rats, dead trees out on the ridge. As I ran, I shouted at God, gods, any goddamned god who’d made the world we lived in at that moment. Dead mothers, children with napalm-sizzled skin. I screamed fuck at God.… More
The goddamn football stadium and the streets are filled with ads and flags supporting future brain damage survivors and NFL flunkies. Never mind the fact all that brain injury makes them into sad, violent, adult children. That doesn’t matter. What does matter?… More
“Buck up, Slim” was his catchphrase. It was the kind of catchphrase that stuck. The kind that gets hung on you like a life sentence in a show that started in black and white and went technicolor in season 2.… More
What he remembered was the earth unwinding below him like a bedsheet, patched in yellow and green. All intoxication blown away by the killing wind. He saw it clearly. The world was vaster and more various than anyone knew.… More
Obviously I couldn’t have his baby, because he was who he was, but also because the idea of existing in the world as a pregnant man made me sick to my stomach, and I’d been on testosterone for so many years it could cripple the tiny, growing thing.… More
I wanted stories with working class people fed up with the daily grind, waking up to the idea that our economic system is built for a small fraction of people and that the American Dream is a kind of lullaby they sing to us to keep us showing up to work on time.… More
Life is a fucking roo and you’ve got to punch it in the dick before it knocks you out.… More
He’s been dead maybe ten minutes. Maybe thirty. Long enough for the ice in his Jameson-and-ginger to turn thin, to drift apart, their edges fraying into the map of something broken.… More
And—in that moment—she thought she was happy, but really, she was just drunk… More