We leave the windows open so we can hear the surf from a few blocks away.  Guests from last weekend left a couple bottles of wine so we helped ourselves, saving the trip to the store for tomorrow.  Tomorrow a series of silences and the words that fill up silences.

After midnight the laughter of teenagers walking along the sidewalk, glitter and sandals and fingers entwined.  You tell me a story about when you were a kid and you used to come down here with your family--I've…

It was One Million BC, a Saturday night as it happened,  and Bork, Bubba, Barney, and Fred sat shivering around a sputtering fire; stiff winds whistled right through the cave they were in, rain blew in with it, the place was skank to begin with--bear shit for days--and they were a long way from home.

It had been one fucked-up day: they'd gone on the hunt and couldn't even bring down a dik-dik, and then finally they did and a troop of baboons came pimping on by and…

I used to steal peaches right off the tree, a Kool-Aid face kid who hopped a chicken wire fence, ran to the trees fast as I could, plucked the fuzzy fruit with a twist and a swoosh of leaves. 

I don’t remember eating them, don’t remember if they were sweet as sunshine, or bitter as a reluctant spring. …

“What do we have Tom?”

Lieutenant Uejo stood in the doorway of the office, smoothing down his tie, inspecting the ornate pattern of origami cranes in hues of blue that dove down his shirt. Like all the upstairs suits, Uejo was transparent, the cliché…

If you walked a mile in Hangman’s shoes you’d end up a mile back of where you started because brother Hang’s shoes never took one step forward without taking  two back. He rode a Trailways  from San Pedro via El Paso just to get to Vegas. Now here he sits, king down, nine showing and considering his options.  The sun will rise polka dotted in a checker board sky before Hangman draws a deuce. Double or nothing he knows nothing but you can’t call Hang a quitter.

“Hit me.”

They are the color of tempered steel. The fat palms press face to face, the middle fingers tied firmly and neatly to each other with grayish string, thumbs bent inward, the other fingers stiff and free, the fingertip pads removed, precise peel cuts that have sliced away all hope of any identification; a ridge of raised white vein - thick as tendon - track up to the wrists at the cutoff.…

Some mamas would have their babies stay babies, especially boy children, the next set of dicks in the world, who learn soon enough to spit like their daddies.

My mother came to my bed in a dream; I was three. She started in eating my feet and then up she came, chewing through muscle and tendon and bone, and then at my guts she looked up at me and grinned like a Gorgon and kept right on coming. 

Later I took my food in the alleys and learned above all the value of shadows and…

The bar’s centerpiece was a lucite cypress tree, backlit by pink and white fluorescent lights, each level of carved branch and foliage serving as a shelf for bottles of high end liquor, glowing like gemstones on laudatory pedestals.

He wore a fitted sport coat over a pristine white dress shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, staring into a glass of Old Fashioned, poking with a tiny red straw at a slice of…

“Please keep items away from the art as we don’t want anything damaged or scratched accidentally.”

I had pointed - with a rolled paper flyer - at the Warhol silkscreen hanging at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, a one-color triple print of Elvis pointing pistols at our heads. I had been enthusiastically indicating to my two friends…

 My unit had "training days" on the last Friday of every month in which a group of fifty young artillerymen would be crammed into a stuffy room that was made for twenty, we would listen arduously to the least charismatic speakers in Korea talk about the most ironic subject matter for each individual.

Sergeant Wooddell, who had an oral cavity that would make a meth head look like a Colgate model, was our stuttering dental liaison.

Sergeant First Class Campbell…

My love for capturing life with a camera developed when I found myself in a darkroom during a manual photography class at a local art center. I was introduced to chemicals in canisters and the rough tumble of a new language – depth of field, white balance, saturation, stop bath. Sunday afternoons found me in a lightless booth no bigger than a shower stall, tipping my film back and forth in a slosh of liquids. I liked the chance to be absent of sight, to meditate on the beauty of wrought-iron…

Okay, so let's say a good friend brings someone over to your house for drinks and nibbles on your back deck, of an evening, and you assume that because you really like your friend, this new person will be likeable, too.

As the evening progresses, the person talks almost ceaselessly about himself while dropping names of well-known people in politics and business -- names you see in the papers all the time -- and after three…

“I got a new hip, you know, one of them ones they pound into your leg bone, all made outta titaynum and shit, boom, boom, boom,” he said, swinging an air hammer like he was pounding a spike into an old hickory stump. “Two weeks later I fell on that side and the titaynum ball popped out of its socket, and, boy, I’m here to tell ya that hurt like the dickens, screwed my eyes shut and screamed for help, and they popped it back in, but something ain't quite right yet. I live in a adult foster…

Walking in rain, I come to a gingerbread gift shop, the proverbial one in a village of dreams, that summons the children to wish and to plot and to envy like burghers of old.

Inside, cornucopias: cookies and cakes, the latter three-tiered, with groom and bride blushing on icing on top.

Bone knives awaken in boys the impulse to murder; rag dolls in cribs whose lives are a sigh take girls by the throat...

I stare and stare down the years and hear a nun rapping for order, a…

It's blank and oblong.

Your spray-on tan fades rapidly.

You’re thirsty as a Giraffe—all the time.…

He was hung, no need to mince words, he was hung like a horse, made Milton Berle look like a Chinese stereotype--

(Oh, now for Pete’s sake, that’s out of line, Joey.)

(Oh God, unclench, I’m dating a Chinese man, I can say whatever I want.) …

David shuffled through the cold, darkness and shivered while cursing himself for not wearing something warmer to shield him from the chilly night air and wondered how he ever let himself be talked into taking on this sorry-ass assignment.  "Dammit," he thought, he was a well-respected investigative journalist, and not some wet-behind-the-ears first year journalism student working on a final project, but he was the new kid on the block, and not as well-respected as he liked to believe, so his…

I'm sitting along a back wall at the Sweetwater Starbucks to avoid the heavy rain.  My exposed toenails are blue with cold as Tony Bennett sings about good times not coming around anymore.

The man in the wingback chair to my left is reading a book, his skin pink with brown patches, tissue paper thin.  His navy shirt, khaki pants and Timberland boots are still wet from rain.

I'm facing my own book, David Sedaris's Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, but my eyes…

It's almost a law like gravity or something: think with your dick and sooner or later, some kind of way, you get it lopped off.

Dennis shagged his old lady's kid sister, in their fucking bedroom, the nitwit cocksucker, and then found out he'd married Geronimo's daughter. She brought out a breadknife and carved him while he was asleep, and later that night slipped Skeeter their spaniel an extra taste treat with the Alpo.

Dennis moved to Las Vegas and hooked up with old…

Please--Oh, God--don’t leave me, I mean you can’t, right, because, because, remember the time we got stuck at the top of the Ferris wheel and we couldn’t keep our hands off each other?

Ahem, okay, no, lemme try again, lemme give it another Boy Scout try.

Please--Oh, my love--you can’t leave me, ‘cause…