Having read something about it, she asked, "You know why the Chinese cook with a wok?"

They knew at once that the question, gravid with those inherently amusing k sounds, offered the perfect chance to…

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"Here. Now it's shorter."
"Well...."
"Well, what?"
"No denouement."
"Rats."

"Here you are. A short story."
"Rewrite it."
"Again?"
"Yep. Too wordy."

“Why are you sad, son?”

“On television, there was a teacher, and people were mean to her.”

“They were mean to her?”

“Yes, people were mean to her because she was a Presbyterian, and they wouldn’t let her be a teacher any more, and she was crying; it made me sad.”

He looked a question at his wife, who shrugged, palms up, so he asked the child, “What is a Presbyterian?”

“It’s when you’re, you know, gay, but you’re a girl.”

Friday, he said, “Things look fine, just fine, but I just want to check a few things, so I’m sending you to the lab on three for some tests.“

I knew he would tell me, “It’s a wonder you can stagger from the couch to the refrigerator and back; anyone else with your alpha, alpha, alpha 2,4,6 dioxyribopreposterase level would be in a coma. Take two of these three times a day for a week, and you’ll be a new man.”…

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The defender lay at the mouth of an Iwo Jima cave, staring at them without expression. Seeing his wounds, the lieutenant said, “Kill him,” and the sergeant did as he was told.

The pain was exquisite; the dreams, enduring. He treated them both with thirty years of cigarettes and beer and wishing he was dead. “What I did was wrong,” he wept. “I should’ve killed him myself.”