Teeth
Everything belonged to Russell now. My mother was his wife, I was his son, we lived in his house—an isolated farm we didn’t need and couldn’t afford. Russell had started cutting trees off the property and selling the timber to make the mortgage payments. He was sharpening the teeth of a chainsaw on the front...
White Guy
I was in Walmart yesterday, swung around the end of one aisle where a five-foot-high cardboard-display edge stuck out about eight inches and, like an old fuck, caught it with my chest. Back up slightly, proceed on toward the Life Savers. Halfway up the aisle (around the Life Savers) this black guy, twenty-five-ish, slightest smile...
Intro to Creative Writing
Professor Stevens dislikes donuts; the icing gets stuck in his beard. Fridays he breakfasts at Burger King before heading out to the lake, where he smokes cigarettes on the shore and ignores his wife’s phone calls. He idolizes James Dickey. He’s no good at fiction. The Department Chair’s out to get him. He strolls into...
Little Things
My mother’s dollhouse has become a constant reminder of something—what?—in the time we spend with her, if it could be said to be spent. At eighty-nine she remembers very little. She does not so much talk as chime, like a clock with a surreal burden: Do we have anything to eat for dinner? Yes, chicken....
Duplex
The person on my voicemail was a man. His voice was high, higher than most men’s voices I’d heard before, and he spoke slowly, as if reading off of cue cards. I didn’t know when the call came in. My cell phone never rang. Rather, in that late morning, the phone vibrated, informing me of...
Swerve
I’m sorry about that time I ran over a piece of wood in the road. A pound of marijuana in the trunk and a faulty brake light—any minute the cops might have pulled us over, so you were edgy already, and then I ran over that piece of stray lumber without even slowing down. Thunk,...
Somebody Else’s Genocide
After my reading in Atlanta, Georgia, a blond woman asked me, in German-accented English, if my books were translated and published in Germany. “Ja,” I said. I studied German for two years in high school and one semester in college, but I remembered only a few words—abgehetzt, schoner, arschloch—and only one phrase: Ich habe sieben...
Accident
Not really looking as I crank the engine and start downhill for town, I tilt my head out my window in a rush of wind to take in winter stars and sweep away the fumes from a petty argument at home. My escape velocity: not fast enough, but faster than I should be going. Right...
The Widow’s Trailer
Ryan stole twelve Shiners from dad’s stash in the shed. We drank them warm in the ditch behind the park, sitting on skateboards and smoking discarded cigarette butts without fear. We drank them fast, bottle for bottle, playing it cool and suppressing the urge to gag. After four beers Ryan said, “watch this,” and took...
I Just Lately Started Buying Wings
Her voice, like some holy place, issues from a warm brown prayer of a face. She’s going blind. She doesn’t worry about her son’s alcoholism anymore, or the injustice of the everyday. “It’s like lye in the sink and you better not put your hands in it,” she says. She’d know. She’s cleaned a lot...
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....
The Paranoid Nurse
I’d spent the afternoon polishing the hull of my sailboat, which sat on a trailer in my front yard in Phoenix. Now it was night. I was standing next to it in the moonlight, admiring its pearly sheen. A compact car pulled up to the bungalow across the street. A woman wearing a white nurse’s...
Wildlife in Los Angeles: A Phone Call
“How are you?“ “Tired. I didn’t sleep at all last night.” “Because . . .” “It’s a really long story. . .” “Yes. . .” “Well, the tenants have mice. So my neighbor and I went out and finally found live traps. They were expensive but. . .” “And you trapped the mice.” “Well, we got one. We brought...
The Sudanese Lady and Elvis
Tiny, middle-aged, with black western-styled hair, wearing matching skirt and top from Paris, the Arabic Sudanese woman stared at me. We were at a dinner party in Maadi, an exclusive suburb of Cairo. Employing an Oxford English–plotted, selective, erudite if slow in passing through her lips–she made fun of me. Not of me, of course....
Wild Rose
Listen, she says, I’m seventy years old, my husband’s gone, he left me peanuts and my kids aren’t getting a nickel. I’m at Gold Strike Casino, a half-mile north of Hoover Dam. Her face is hard and blank as the dam. We’re playing quarters. I’m on Wild Cherry. She’s on Double Diamond. This goddamn machine,...
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