I am a guest in the home of friends who welcome me with so much love that I stay close to tears throughout my visit.

At night, I feel safe because several adults are preparing for bed nearby, a feeling I miss from my childhood. When I hear their footsteps one floor above, I become eight years old again, in bed, secure because my parents are managing the world around me.

Four sentry dogs…

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…

In the dark, under the covers, we see who can make the other laugh at absurd or vulgar names for garage bands. It starts out innocently enough with your "Hebrews on Weed." The game escalates/devolves into "The Anal Warts," "The Bleached Assholes," "The Yellow Scabs," and "The Butt…

Stalingrad, they say,  had 850,000 residents in 1940, but when the war ended in 1945,  only 1,500 of these had survived. Our family was among them.

When we heard that Hitler's 6th Army was approaching, it was still summer and there was time enough for everyone to flee and plenty of crops for us to eat along the way.

But Comrade Stalin said no, we had to stay. The Red Army, the people's army, would fight harder to…

Begin a story with the word 'because:' Because it was a Sunday, Garth allowed Fat Myrtle to attend church before he carried out her long-planned murder.

Begin a story with the word unfortunately: Unfortunately for Fat Myrtle, Garth had been holding a grudge ever since he had been late with the rent three years earlier and she had dumped all his…

The events seemed unconnected at the time,  starting when Aunt Gaylen’s right breast popped out of her dress at Easter Sunday service as she pushed up from kneeling at the rail.

Then Howler (that’s not his real name, but he’s been called that since he cut his first tooth) vomited on the Humane Shelter waiting room chairs and was rushed home before he got to choose his puppy.

Father…

The first line of a song must be the first line of your story.  I'll go first:

"See the pyramids along the Nile, or, if you are worried about political unrest, I could book you a nice river cruise in Germany for $3,750 apiece," Shelley offered, fanning brochures across her desk.

I looked at Harvey, who was going paler with each new suggestion as the castanets in his…

Dear mom and dad: I bet you didn’t expect to hear from me after all these years, eh?

I hope you are still living at the old house with the broken attic fan and have not moved away so that a stranger is reading this right now ha ha.

After  the fire wiped out dad’s sheds and the alfalfa field, and after granddad said I was a stone on his heart and dropped dead on the lawn sprinkler, I…

I'd rather you forget what I'm about to tell you, here, and think of me as a good person, although why I should care what you think, you with all your flaws and unpaid debts and crud in your bathtub drain, I do not know.

I have generalized my intense dislike of a former Filipino landlord into a dislike for all Filipinos, thus becoming just like every other racist asshole, and though I try to reason away the…

I was 13 when the phone call came with news of Teeny’s death.

Her Ma asked to talk to me, personally, but when she heard my voice she broke down in hard sobs, the kind that words can’t get through.

She said a drunk driver was the cause, but I could not listen to the details about Teeny on the pavement under her smashed-up bicycle.  I just handed the phone to my Ma and went looking for a suitcase because…

“Why is it that, according to you, there doesn’t exist a single stupid Jew?” he asks, head thrust forward aggressively.  He stirs his drink with a swizzle stick unnecessarily because the whole thing is Scotch, top to bottom.

He has been angry with me for weeks because I pointed to a website about the accomplishments of 20^th…

 When they bought the Noe Valley row house, she had wanted to dig up the eucalyptus shrubs that reminded her of childhood bronchitis and Vicks Vapo-Rub applied by her granny’s cold hands.

He had vetoed the change, arguing that the bushes were the only thing about the house he liked, that she had gotten her pick of neighborhoods so at least, in this one thing,…

During the night, even your feet are hot to the touch. You throw off the covers and turn on the ceiling fan, which in turn flings your heat to the corners of the room.

This is my secret source of income, you see, for while you sleep, I charge admission to strangers who want to witness the miracle of you.

"Lay-deeez and gennel-mun," I call from our front lawn under a quarter…

To him, I am just Client #227 on his table, an anonymous female lying face-down under a sheet, just someone who showed up at the Korean spa where he is known only as accupressure massage therapist #5.

He was assigned to me randomly and, as it turns out, most fortuitously because he's rough trade and I like it…

In many families there's one person who makes things happen to the rest. This person is the flywheel in the machinery, unnoticed -- not like the flashy handlebars or fat tires -- but keeping the others in motion, all right.

Let's say his name is Jay and he is an addict who empties grandma's purse so she can't buy blood pressure pills, and she has a…

I imagine Vladimir Nabokov with a booming voice,  broken blood vessels in his cheeks, and a fondness for  pickled herring on black bread eaten late at night by his typewriter.

He once told a friend, "My loathings are simple: Cruelty, stupidity, oppression, and soft music," making him the first person ever to critique the modern mall experience.

What three things could I say, with finality, that I loathe, since loathesomeness is such a moving target? Certainly Nabokov's choices…

What I remember is how white the room was – the walls, the curtains between our tiny cots, the sheets that covered us and later, the surgeon’s mask and gown.

I had never heard the sounds of other children sleeping – I was an only child – and on that ward, the cries and moans from the nearby beds sounded more like animals, like pups, than people.

I remember the black rubber mask coming…

I told Teeny that her granny had a crush on the monsignor at Holy Cross (a volleyball-shaped man with smooth fingernails), but Teeny said, no, her granny just got that way (all girly and high-voiced) whenever she was close to holiness.

“Ladies don’t put on lip gloss or bake red velvet cakes for holiness,” I pointed out, and I bet Teeny we could set up a crush test that would prove her granny had the…

McClardy wanted nothing material, and that is precisely what he brought back from the Vietnam War -- and what he had accumulated ever after.

If you had asked him, "Hey, Mac, what would you really like to have?" once per decade since he returned stateside (with scar tissue where his spleen should have been), he would have shrugged and said: A chance to play with Clapton at the Fillmore. 

Later it might have been, a chance to pitch a…

McClardy walked the rows of coats at the Goodwill  -- the original one on 7th Avenue, not the phony new one on the Bypass -- because Junie, there, kept an eye out for clothes his size and tucked them away.

Junie and he used to go together, back in the day, back when McClardy had a working prostate and a job, before the Bush team stripped the nation of its factories and raped the VA up the butt. …