It was going on a month that Lilly had been staying with her parents, Bill and Caroline, at their lake house in Vermont. Although Bill had been a full-bird colonel in the United States Army, there was only one commander in that family, and every time I called I could hear her evil whispers poisoning his ear. 

He weighed 210 pounds buck-ass naked; 217 in his leather jacket and boots, which he wore that crisp March evening to the bar along with a gold pin in his lapel. It was shaped like a spade, a gift from his wife when they were young, once she’d discovered how much he liked expensive-looking things. 

I know your publication is a newsworthy one, so I know you’re used to getting letters about newsworthy stuff. You’d normally get a letter about flesh-eating streptococcus or severe acute respiratory syndrome.

This was fifteen years ago in Hoboken. The storefront apartment on Madison Street. Her front step served as a landing pad for local strays. One stray was a shepherd-and-lab mix, one was a

The Chicken Mask was sorrowful, Sis. The Chicken Mask was supposed to hustle business; it was supposed to invite the customer to gorge him or herself within our establishment;

I came to on the loggia—the only question was whose loggia? There was the Cavanaghs’ loggia, designed by that famous and locally celebrated architect whom I once met. The name is gone. 

The Ruin — where my friend Jorge Ruiz spent some of his nights — was decorated in twisted car parts and fruitless conversation and postindustrial clutter, in the collision of strangers and in the flicker of lost opportunities.

A long gap in the conversation followed and then he told his father about the tornado at school that day. They were out on the patio in back, facing the street that ran past. The father smoothed a long strand of hair over the barren part of his head and returned to the plate of macaroni and cheese in his lap.

Lai was hidden in the middle of forests when the Vai people found it. There was evidence of earlier townsmen there, as ends of stoneware and crushed diamonds were found scattered on hilltops in the unexpected company of domestic cats. 

Although she had been around them her whole life, it was when she reached thirty five that holding babies seemed to make her nervous—just at the beginning, a twinge of stage fright swinging up from