In all those moments after he’d lit the fuse but before the rocket-powered roller skates propelled him across the yellow desert at sublimely sub-sonic speeds, in all those moments what came most vividly to Coyote the Younger were the…
Everyone expected me to take my mother’s eyes. I had a right to take what I wanted, and her eyes were legendary. She’d taken them from her mother, and her mother had taken them from her mother. They were…
I picked Jeff up from the airport. We’d met online and chatted for a few months. Newly divorced, he said, about fifteen years older than me. But he was normal, and he was from somewhere else. I’d spent hours…
My girlfriend has a pet rock that watches us in bed. A cold lump of gray with googly eyes, a feather headband, and a red glitter mouth that Becca would never wear. It used to be in a box…
On a warm, wet November day like this one, I saw what I thought was some drunk, some ambitious drunk, stumbling up Route 376 with his takeout. It was the sort of thing I might have been tempted to ignore.…
We make a ton of money off Christmas in July, because customers have too much hope. It’s not their fault. Me and Rubina feed it to them. We decorate Paradise Pawn with tinsel and lights. We smile and hold…
But where exactly had it gone wrong this day? Probably when my brother-in-law-to-be, Ward DiBaptista, shouted at me to move the Tahoe so it wouldn’t rut the yard, or maybe just after that, when my fiancée’s entire family made…
That morning, when they set out to follow the fence line that surrounded their property, Sarah Billard didn’t expect her daddy to stop at the southern section. She could hardly recall the last time seed had taken root there—all…
My parents, they had flaws. I was the kid left waiting at school, watching all the other kids’ parents pick them up on time while I got BLISTERS from squeezing the chain-link fence so hard, only to become someone else’s RESPONSIBILITY…
Cassie found the book at a bus stop next to a pair of abandoned men’s shoes: The Study and Practice of Astral Projection: The Definitive Survey on Out-of-the-Body Experiences, by Dr. Robert Crookall. On the cover was a drawing…