Stories

I sometimes forget I’m a horse. I’m also a man dressed as a horse.

Our house sits alone out in the country, seven miles north of town.

She did not leave him for the sailor. So why should he be angry?

She flicked a bit of citrus on her tongue. Her laugh was hard and high.

On my way to the airport I hit a Christian. This was in Arkansas.

All night the insects’ grinding jaws chewed through the darkness.

So, Ida, are you a Jew or a nudist? Do you believe in Hanukkah?

I dream of snakes coming out of me and through the house to find her.

When Roy got to school he told his friend Jimmy Boyle about the dead body.

The Wolf put on a great performance, crawling around on the stage.

He knows what she’s seeking, and he knows she won’t find it.

I can’t talk yet. But I know things. I will tell you all this later when I can.

A queen bobcat lives in the hollow base of a dead cypress.

He touched her bruise more softly than an elevator button.

It’s so good to see you, she kept saying. You too, he said. She led him around the house to the places she’d stored his things. They had broken up five months earlier, while still long distance.

With my son in the NICU and my wife in tears, it felt good to disobey.

I yell at the boys: “What are you doing! Are you out of your minds?”

The mistake you make with this man is, you wait around for him.

Why had she asked him to come along, someone she did not even know?

“This day should never end,” we said, though we knew it would. Back at the ramshackle house, we were alone.

I know exactly what to do when Papa has a seizure in the middle of the night.

A plus B; a child in peril, plus love, dissolution of, equals a story.

The night before my mother’s double mastectomy, we went skinny-dipping.

The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen has become the saddest.

I pictured you at Bagram Airfield in a metal coffin, quiet and still.

He doesn’t have to lie about oatmeal. That’s the way things are for him.

Our hopes swirled around the act of swallowing a teaspoon of yogurt.

My father then got partials implanted, which were later punched out.

Divorced. Wife living with someone else. Pregnant with his child.

My mother used to cry in church seeing a child walk down the aisle.