Bowling
I remember my father with his pot belly, polishing his bowling ball, standing on the lane, taking a deep breath, getting ready to swing his arm back and then forward. I never told my father how beautiful he looked and how grateful I was that when he threw a strike, he always turned around to...
Wednesday, Cracker Barrel Restaurant
Crackertown, my nephew once called this place, which made a kind of toddling sense: town of Cracker, island off the coast of Frontage Road, where time tries its hardest to forget where it’s heading, the past rattling around in gadgets, trinkets, knickknacks, tchotchkes, so many consonants clanging together make something like music in my head...
Mineral Spirits
We pushed up mounds in the ground where we would have been, the dirt a darker gray for being turned. Three boy graves under three boy-made grave crosses, all of us in short sleeves waiting beneath a flat white sky shot through by water oaks. Me, my brother, Kirk, our cousin, Jason. This was back...
Bobbie on the Pole
Sometimes Bobbie spends the whole night in the dressing room talking on her cell phone and smoking cigarettes and changing her outfit over and over again. She doesn’t like to sit in the bar and talk to the managers or the bartenders or the customers. She’s been here long enough that the front of her...
I Enjoyed Being a Girl
Click a tape into the VCR. And play. As the song begins, a girl in a pink lace dress and white lace gloves sits on the edge of a faded plastic chair in the middle of a high school gymnasium. She and a troupe of a dozen other girls cross their legs, tap their toes,...
Slide
He slid down the big Curly-Q slide today. It was starting to rain, a light drizzle rare in our desert town, but we agreed it didn’t matter. The feat was too momentous. He knew it, and so did I. While kids his age and height (2 years old, 3 feet tall) have gone flying down...
Good As It Gets
My grandmother leans against the milkshake machine, thin in her starched white waitress uniform, one arm across her waist and the other one poised with her cigarette like a forties movie star. The cigarette is nearly burned to the filter; a long cylinder of ash hangs on. Her hand trembles as she shifts her cigarette....
Crazy Ed
He wore Ace bandages all over his body, but bore no injuries anyone could see. The bandages covered his thin, muscular arms, tanned from the daily mowing of his immaculate lawn. You could hear his self-congratulations houses away after he finished his race down the block. As he reached the finish line, he would wrench...
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