Abdullah has fond memories of happy days when his family laughed and ate well as they worked the poppy fields in the highlands by the village where he was born.

His mother and older brother died when the invading russians used gas on the village to stop guerilla activity against them.

his father joined the mujaheddin, was abandoned by the americans, was then killed as a traitor and spat upon as Abdullah fled with his little sister in the dead of night.

Now a scrawny…

Bits of knees and feet flutter below bags of hot dog buns and bowls of potato chips. The ice bucket is a bully, standing like a fire plug, forcing everyone to reach around. Onions and lettuce skip among us, and no one can impose reason on any of the condiments. It feels as if the water in the pool has suddenly absorbed our sound, and with our paper rafts full of charred meat, we hum like cavemen. The old man at the head…

"God damn kids. I am going to beat them senseless!" My father used to drunkenly scream in the kitchen as the plates and glasses smashed in a sound that made the fiercest thunder crash nothing to fear for the rest of my childhood.

"Honey, calm down they have school in the morning and are asleep." My mother said in the stage whisper that told us to keep our ass in bed or things would get really bad.

The crescendo of crockery interspersed with screams and cries of mercy as well as…

She just didn't get it.

Here she had been at headquarters all spring long, gathered from the wrong pasture because of all the water gaps being down or maybe it was that oak tree that fell on the fence, but here she had been at headquaters all spring long and now they wanted her to move.

She didn't go off to the Basin with the first group of cows because when they branded her baby, the moon was in the wrong phase and instead of clotting, he just laid down and…

Only the drinks were the same, glasses of Black Velvet on ice, or "velvet rocks" if you've ever tended bar or you want to sound sophisticated, though no one ever saw it as a sophisticated drink, just the whiskey lovers drink, and that qualifies me.

Otherwise, I walked from one world into an entirely other world last night and the contrast was so strong as to make me laugh out loud about the time the art show auctioneer began to whistle and rattle through the paintings and…

After the smoke has settled into a stink yellowing the den walls and morning comes to kick Ray Ray and I square in the nose, I realize I’m feeling a mite out of sorts, what with the better share of a Bourbon county distillery leaving my body with one bitch of a bill.

I rub the modern art piece my hair’s become, lift my face off of the floor and ask Ray Ray, “You got any Ale-8 in the icebox?”…

Thanks to everyone who participated in the “Norma Jean’s Accountant” Challenge.

I think we all learned a few things about our fellows.

I learned that my reading content has been dismally weak and narrow for years.

Here’s the rundown of Who…

“For god’s sake, Nelle, it’s done. Don’t diddle with it.”…

Its just what we do, you know, because we can't live it all, think it all, express it all and our imaginations and memory banks get so full that we have to put it down on paper, all the things we've stolen as we watched and listened.

My boyfriend/partner/lover just finished reading the ?th draft of the novel I wrote (its only his second time to read it but I can quote parts of it verbatim and I get a stomach ache when I think about reading it again), and when he got to the…