She was wearing the dress.  It had rained hard much of the morning but had stopped by eight-thirty, and, now, as he held the car door for Kara at the house, he could feel the humidity building again, sun mostly obscured by thunderheads from the west.  "Mom didn't seem very interested in where we're going...apples really would have given it away, if she'd been paying attention,"  Kara said as she settled.

Forty-five minutes later, they had Robby strapped into the back seat of the…

"Don't throw your shitty first drafts on a bonfire, for chrissakes," my sister crackles into my ear via sat phone, ten states away. She lives at some godawful altitude where cell phones don't work, and now that she has decided that my manuscripts might actually someday be worth something, she is calling me all in a lather.

This is…

Something strange happened while attending my ‘Remember the ‘60’s?’ high school class reunion. When I attempted to reintroduce myself to some of my suddenly ‘non-teenager’ classmates, I was greeted with vacant and suspicious stares, as if they were confronting a shuffling person on the street hustling for spare change or drugs or worse, “entertainment”; oddly, these bastards had no recollection of me at…

The boat this time was covered with the eyes, all startling blue, each blinking as they would, and he tried to ignore them and concentrate on the shore.  He didn't seem to be getting any closer so began to pull with great effort, straining mightily, trying not to think of how he was sitting on the eyes or that his feet were resting on them--they continued to seem unharmed--and he pulled and pulled, the staring things on the ends of the oars blinking the water from their lashes.  He was…

I bring in Torrey to take out trash. I don’ mind a mick because he quite the useful one. Other day he remove a couple wogs in cheap flash suits and silly big collar. I don’ want dem in my place. Dey try to steal my girls to work street and Torrey make sure dey doan come beck. He work behind bar too, mix-up sometimes specialty drink, doe he make the good Molotov cocktail.

Hannah’s hair blew in the wind, not the type to use hair spray. Void of makeup her face was squeaky clean.

Swollen feet and ankles matched her baby bump.

His eyes never left sight of her once she came into view…thinking this was too good to be true, the waiter struck up a conversation, “Ma’am, may I seat you in the Garden Room?”

“Yes, I’m waiting for my husband, he’s only a few minutes behind me; can you make sure he knows where I am, I think my labor…

Such a screaming silence, was all Jim could think of on the ride back--there was no way to cover his ears or stop the pictures even with eyes wide open.  He left his mother in the Volvo parked in the lot next to Wyman Institute and made his way through the manicured flora of the grounds, stopping to pick a yellow carnation, taking a step then going back to snatch a second before moving on:  Kara was sitting on a stone bench not far from the brick administration building  talking to…

Your stories are marvels of precision.

Like Calder’s mobiles, they move in perfect balance

on the slightest updraft. …

Sammy stands in front of the group and, as ordered by their youth group leader, starts to show the evidence of his abuse to the others, "I was just a baby, a little kid, and I didn't know it wasn't right. Mom said if I didn't dress like this, do that, or learn to speak in their heathen tongue, I wasn't a true member of the family and I wanted to be a part of the family so I did it." Taking a deep breath, allowing the calm to take hold, feeling strength among…

"There's nothing wrong,"  Jim's mother said as she got out of the Volvo, heading for the back as Jim pushed open his door and stood beside his grandmother.

She took his arm again, green eyes boring into him:  "These are only half,"  he said.

"Good,"  she replied in a fierce whisper, "you bring the other half...and bring your sister, too...this can't go on...not this way..."

"Here you are, Mother,"  Jennifer Dalton declared, bringing one of the baskets,  "and stop your…

He stares at that plate but there’s way too much to devour. He picks at it with his fingers, eager to dig into the cornucopia of fresh babble and tiny tender tidbits. Some of it is interesting and exotic, some of it so over-cooked, it’s hard to swallow but several of the fragmented entrees are interesting and he stabs at a few pieces of his savory drivel. Here’s a possible palatable morsel that has a simple flavoring but he feels it’s not quite tasty enough. He continues to poke…

I don't know how long it'd been since I'd seen a panhandler on the side of the road but today it occurred to me that the streets were surprisingly empty on such a clear, blue sky, 58 AQI day.

The bus stopped at the light just behind of the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial bridge and on the column I noticed there was a nasty mural which showed people, starved and disheveled, imprisoned waiting for death and cremation.

In my mind's eye I could see all the panhandlers -- those too…

Rage chewed up the road, ingesting it like a long black twist of licorice. Its fast rubber ran hot over the cracked and torn skin of endless miles, boredom and road kill, the sameness fueling its discontent. Ahead, the beautiful raised scar of Blacktop stretched serenely, quietly listening to the unrelenting echoes of enterprise rolling like distant thunder. She felt its sudden weight upon her then, rough fingertips…

Our manager, chipper lady always smiling and cracking jokes, pointed out the new girl who looked plain and uninteresting, "Moody ain't she? One of those 'it's the quiet ones you gotta watch' postal-worker types."

Over the next few months, she remained 'the quiet one' who worked diligently, often finishing assignments early, and always ate lunch alone - although, on occasion, she allowed me to sit with her - while reading some book on various world atrocities past and present, female…

When he got to the house she was raking up crabapples, bushel basket partly-filled, hair covered with a red kerchief, a few shades darker than the healthy tint of her skin.  "That time of year again,"  he said, though it wasn't quite, and he stopped a few feet away;  he watched his mother straighten and wipe perspiration from her brow, the air closer, now, the pungent smell of the rotting fruit pressing in upon them.  He swiped at the gnats.

"Obviously, half the apples have yet to…

“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…

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.…

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…

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.) …

"Starting and continuing a movement is a lot like running a business," Metzger said to me,"you start small, in my case I started with one neighborhood, Prairie Avenue in Soy City, the cops didn't patrol the area unless gunshots were involved, addicts and pimps took over the street raping and robbing the poor citizens living there, one man told me he felt like a fish in a shot glass."

"A friend of the cause ran a dealership in town, he would drive me in an SUV after dark, a…