In the spring of 1977, the State Champion Mime receives his trophy. After the applause dwindles he removes most of his make up with Noxzema and tissue. He slips out of his costume, striped-shirt, black pants and bowler into bellbottoms, paisley and platforms. He tucks...

In the beam of headlights, we found the massive heap on the shoulder of the highway, a half-dead bull elk pawing at the moon, eyes like river stones and a rack that could gouge holes in the porous, starlit sky. Shoot, Papa said, coming to a stop. He’s still alive, and...

I saw a huge spider web with a horsefly trapped, unable to get away. I called my friends to come over and see it just above the kitchen window. I dragged a chair over so we could take turns looking at it through my magnifying glass. Mom says the horseflies are...

When we get back from church, the living room curtains are closed. A vampire is sitting on the couch with the remote, checking out the different channels like he’s never seen cable before. Mámi asks who invited him in. “Not me, it must have been Emily!” Junior says....

I’m glaring at you in the middle of pine-scented nowhere. Did you know I won this trip by memorizing the most Bible verses? I thought one of my prayers had finally been answered. My family wanted to vacation with the Steubens. Their son Kyle was my first gay...

The phone velcroed to the van’s dashboard vibrates twice and the screen lights up.  Where?  Peco taps back 14th, 57th.  He punches down the accelerator with a foot wrapped in a battered moccasin and the van scoots across the Avenue as a wall of oncoming...

The fringe and the middle meet when somebody like Emmett Kelly sweeps light into a dustpan.                            Kelly is a frowning...

A fruit fly has been hovering around my face for days, though maybe it isn’t the same fruit fly, since I’ve been told that fruit flies only live for twenty-four hours, yet there it is, for the third day in a row, just out of my peripheral vision, circling my ear as if...

A black-and-white blowup of the Vista Inn hangs off the Jury Room wall. Few jurors notice this rural hotel offering adventurers rooms and meals. Eucalyptus accent a two-story with chimney and porch. Axes have swung. Stumps flank a cement walkway up to the double...

Everything was useful-a wire to lace shoes, paper to weave a pad to insulate a jacket. Cups were fabricated from the empty coffee cans.These precious crafted utensils were squirreled into jacket pockets, slept on and inventoried every morning.  Mac listed what he...

Terrine. I saw Charlotte’s mother make this once, a sublime cold dish, lovingly layered with puréed meats and vegetables and then somehow gelled together. I don’t think I’d ever have eaten terrine if I hadn’t seen the ingredients and how Ms. Mason assembled them. It...

            “How’s the President?” I asked.             My brother shrugged.  “Not good.  He was shot three times, twice in the chest.  They...

Mustache. The kid sadly invisible gets kudos from the hippie chick every 4th Street Starbucks employee wanted to bang, or hand-feed gluten-free grain—Nice ‘stache!—you’d have thought I’d shot heroin, patrons staring. Seeing a far cooler me. Had it been actual heroin,...

I ask you if everything looks the same, now that we’ve crossed the border, and you say well, there are more birch trees and dead rabbits. There’s also more sea but we don’t mention this, as this part is obvious. I watch while the water licks the land and think...

Mother washes the dishes and looks like she is too old to wash them, like the sponge is aging her, and the plates are too heavy for her hands-like-bones. I step towards her but it’s just steam. She’s not there. She is on the couch, coughing and looking for her...

It would have been an unremarkable workday, gray and chilly and endless, on a rickety bus headed for east transfer station, if it also hadn’t happened to be the day that a sturdy man vaguely smelling of soup lost his balance, stumbled backwards in an attempt to regain...