My old friend Cormac refuses to speak with me. My letters to him in prison are always returned, unopened. I would phone, but of course…
Afterwards Julia takes over driving duties. She rolls up her long sleeves in preparation, revealing the Chinese symbol for strength tattooed…
Chefs talk about the Zen of chopping and measuring and sautéing. The kitchen is the center of so many things vital to life — warmth, family…
Julia’s father had owned a funeral home and she earned her allowance as a kid by trimming dead peoples’ nails and shampooing their hair for…
Despite everything I have one clear memory of what happened after Cormac decided on what some of my fellow officers refer to as a Detroit…
In my mind the blonde man, huge and swinish, grins and says, “Nice shot, buddy.” A distant crowd applauds and roars its approval. On the…
That night I have another dream. My back is against the boards, the wall of what must be a barn, and I am holding a long piece of metal…
The Kid is there. The room is different, as are the faces around the circle in various states of despair and drool, but the Kid sits across…
Years of my breaks and bruises has made Julia an expert in first aid. I sit patiently on the upstairs toilet as she repairs my face and…
“Hi, hon,” Julia says on the answering machine. “I need to run back to class in a sec, but wanted to let you know I called the Trout this…
Halfway down the block my knees start to shake. It suddenly seems too exhausting to walk into the store, to see Eunice turn pale and smell…
“The thing with people suffering from traumatic brain injury,” my doctor told me once, “it’s hard for them to break from routine. Even a…
It is full dark by the time I track down Stahl’s house. For five hours I have been the Flying Dutchman of faceless suburbia, cruising…
One block down, across the intersection, stands the carbon-neutral café I passed earlier. Its neon sign flickers and hums in the still…
Afterwards I stand behind the police tape with the rest of the onlookers and watch as the firemen in their sooty yellow slickers pick their…
Sylvia Vroom’s hands shake as she upends a bottle of hydrogen peroxide into a cotton ball, and she squeezes the excess into the sink before…
Three blocks later Sylvia speeds up — tires rumbling through sheets of water, the lights beyond our windows blurring to watercolor streaks…
Outside again, cold freezing rain like buckshot on my cheeks. “Take me to Owen,” I tell Fireball, once we stumble our way across the…
Come dawn we turn off the highway and onto a two-lane road snaking through a suburb of manicured, toy-sprinkled lawns and two-story homes…
Like a vampire Fireball starts thrashing soon as the light hits him, bucking and kicking until Owen reaches down and grinds his face into…
Owen’s car is a fine piece of foreign engineering. The engine howls and the road becomes a snaking blur as Owen shifts up and shifts up and…
We head out of town and down old dirt roads where the rocks bite and chew at the car’s low undercarriage and creatures whose luminous eyes…
By the time I feel my way back inside, Owen has finished off half a bottle of wine, the ashtray by his elbow a forest of yellow filters. On…
Owen sits at the table with his head down, fingers twined in his greasy hair, surrounded by plates heavy with grease and scraps. We enter…
Twenty minutes later we turn off onto a dirt road, our headlights illuminating a crooked wooden gate with a new sign wired to the crossbar…