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A match, half a bottle of liquor, a full can of gasoline, a house covered in cheap carpeting, with ancient, oh-so-flammable wooden furniture in every single room…

At first, her feathers are pale gray. Baby wings, they span seven inches and flutter eagerly to the touch. In time, they turn robin’s egg blue, stretching toward the easy insides of her elbows. Her skin is very tender then, like a freshly healed wound, and when her...

“Don’t tell me about your life,” your sister says, shutting the door in your face.              “Okay, sorry for existing,” you reply, grumbling down the stairs....

Listen: Your life will be different than you thought. There will be one night where you will wake up, outside, in the middle of the night, peeing into your underwear, underneath a gazebo in the middle of a dark compound in the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda; a compound...

Only a few people and maybe two stray cats remember when this house was purple, not tan. Every autumn except the last, a white Maltese often frolicked through the yellow ginkgo fans confettied on the sidewalk like he was too late for a parade. A pair of wood-planked...

                                                          , too often a sentence forgets its beginning, wandering to and fro toward an ill-formulated end only to be abandoned in a momentary distraction; an insect in the throes of death trapped at the edge of a...

     I still complain about Dad from time to time (though he's been dead now these many years), whereas he was always complaining about his mother. His own father—unflappable medico from the old country—he never said a word against. But his...

I am still shaking mossy dreams from the rivulets of mind when I remember the story my mother had been describing—it was the one about the yellow duck, the man with the wooden paddle, and the long curl of the Yangtze River in summer’s ebbing light. Somehow I’d...

Don’t say you weren’t warned, there she is my mama begging on the median strip, that busy intersection, her hair ratted, a snarled-up medusa head, her clothes blackened at the edges like a charbroiled steak. Her cardboard sign blesses me for spare change, but I’m six...

The morning after the Phish show I walk around the campground picking up all the used nitrogen balloons with my trash stabber. People had gotten high and sang and danced and smiled while Phish played their music and the lasers splashed all over everyone.  I’d...

This path, this pounded down path, that cuts through the forest and weaves among them like wearing a necklace, lace-mail made of interlinking locks with cathedral cedars as charms and rocky cairns like signposts so you know you are spinning in circles; this path, this...

Outside of our home, a white truck with yellow trim salts the road so our cars don’t slide into a ditch or each other. From the kitchen window my wife and I see it slowly approaching. I’ve poured us coffee and she’s scraping butter onto her toast. She sets down the...

Push. Would it be barely human? Would it suffer? Would the bombs take this too, reaching out in retroactive radiation, touching everything? She clenched teeth, winced, her toes curling against the black sand of Tennessee nuclear wasteland. A home birth, on ash dunes...

Ours was the only circus to cut through the American South before, during, and after the Civil War—kill, kill, kill.  Directions there were mostly misrepresented.  And time, that uncouth bastard, oozed over the landscape before coming to an atmospheric rest....

It is good to feel your steps on the earth not to feel the earth, but to know how you propel yourself. I step hard on the outside of my heels. Some people strike on their toes, some on the inside of their heel, some on the balls of their feet. Some people wear the...

In my half-South African, half-Russian family, the common rule was it’s always someone else’s fault. If something went missing, you didn't lose it. It must have been stolen. The most often misplaced items were small, black, ankle-high socks. All pairs were divided...

Harry leaves me, but I don’t yet know. We didn’t sit down and discuss. I’m leaving you, he never said. I don’t yet know how in the morning, Harry will tell me to leave the breakfast I am cooking, bacon aroma waking him up, and him telling me to come back to bed. How...

This is a superhero story. It’s about a kid who is growing up in Hollywood. He lives alone with his mother in an apartment that was once a cheap motel. She cleans houses in Whitley Heights and gets up early and comes home tired, so he has most of his time to himself....