Stories

Sometimes I wonder if he—my father—looks back on that moment.

Virginia surprises herself: she wants this warmth, wants skin and breath.

“I have a sneaking suspicion that we’re the same person,” she says.

My first girl, only sixteen year and she go, she run away to you.

“Leaving for war, Hayes wept. He didn’t just cry; he wept...”

His eyes, dark brown and unwavering as he delivered the details.

I began to look for evidence of my father’s duplicity in his body.

I offer you these outs, and it stings when you take me up on them.

There was a blue wool afghan draped across the back of the couch.

Over the air conditioner, she hears, unmistakable, the bleating of a siren.

Ralph’s children had believed Christine was just after his money.

The baby in her belly is not a sibling, will never be their playmate.

The phone rang at an awkward hour, too late at night to be good news.

She’d ransacked his heart the moment she unlocked the door.

She wants something red and shiny that always works.

“She showed me her tits,” said Jimmy. “Bullshit!” said Frank.

They danced only with one another and did not speak to white boys.

“For the entire time I was there I couldn’t get that out of my head.”

“We don’t feel like a couple. Haven’t felt like a couple for a very long while.”

The boys came down out of the woods and crossed toward the dock.

I understood that for us there would be no mourning the shortstop.

It never occurred to me that I was being sold too, standing inside my box. Basil was annoyed. All that training he’d given me going to waste on art? I’ve been selling cigarettes, I said, as if it were a credential.

Her skin was bruised under her eyes, purple like the swollen toe.

The linebacker grins, but the lines around his eyes tighten.

He picked up a fairy disguised as a go-go dancer and brought her home.

No-Horse sucked his lips, imagined the taste of the white girls’ hips.

Recently a man in my town took up residence on the football field.

It’s all good,” Mila says, meaning, it’s so not, her voice glass-like.

There was no hiding; right there on my brow was a second nose.