A part of him was happy to see her. She was hard-wired to scrub. The much bigger part of him was wondering how in the hell she found him.… more
A part of him was happy to see her. She was hard-wired to scrub. The much bigger part of him was wondering how in the hell she found him.… more
The downtown lights blazed in the evening air. Slouched behind the wheel, Ismael watched as Loretta’s staff—the few whose physical presence was deemed “essential”—broke at the lobby door and hunched to their cars. Loretta, gone for 15 cold days.… more
He wanted to make a movie about love… He didn’t know when to turn the camera off.… more
The blurb under Jan Anderson’s photo in the Springville High School yearbook said she was on the debate team, sang in the girls’ chorus, and won a prize for writing an essay in French, but the main thing Will Harper remembered about her was her breasts. … more
It occurred to him to kiss her on her sleeping check, but he couldn’t shake the thought that the gloss of vodka on his lips would leave a permanent sanitized mark, a bleached, diamond-shaped tag that would mar her face for life. So he closed her door and stumbled down the hall to the kitchen to top himself off.… more
Sam was teetering underneath that fragile leave-stay threshold. She had to make it just past that…… more
Billy didn’t answer the first call, but the second time his cell phone vibrated on the night stand, he reached for it, pushed himself into a sitting position and answered. The room was dark except for a slat of gray light where the curtain fell open slightly, like a loosened bathrobe. Deborah leaned across and… more
Were instead of are, as if beauty fades with time, which is not what you want a beautiful woman to think about when you are trying to enter her life. You don’t want her thinking about death the way you do. That’s no way to find your Imago.… more
A grocery store clerk confronts his past in the soda aisle. A plumber dreams of ways to eradicate his own profession. … more
Gable smiled when he imagined Hollis climbing behind the wheel in the mornings, looping her seatbelt across her chest and wondering why her Saturn always seemed to smell like her former husband.… more