Stories

I’d never seen my mother’s breasts. Or anyone else’s, for that matter.

On her wedding day Ellen accidently locked herself inside the pantry.

It’s hard to say why Marlee wears the bridesmaid’s dress to work today.

I doubted that I would wring any kind of apology, large or small.

Be glad the numbness in your legs isn’t reading on your face.

I saw Baryshnikov twice. Heard Pavarotti, Marsalis, and Ma.

This Lee was a woman, and she was a painter, and she was good.

A boy who makes dinosaurs from blue clay, each one with three hearts.

Strangely, this may have been the first time I really saw anyone’s face.

I stood among them as if in a brothel and inhaled the wind.

Our father turned to me and said, Why does he sound like a girl.

I fell asleep wondering to whom the tree might have been writing.

He touched her bruise more softly than an elevator button.

Death is a home unseen by the side of the road, the rifle barrel aimed.

American planes were bombing Belgrade, Pristina, and Danilovgrad.

I saw my mother’s face turn dark like the winter sky before a storm.

I realize now that hers was the face that taught me what driving was.

A gesture of intimacy that held within it all that Buffalo once was.

When I see buffaloes run I think of love—how it is held.

Here’s a first, he said, some nutbag wants to dig the grave himself.

The story doesn’t begin until the van breaks down, I always say.

I opened my pocketknife, grabbed his hair in a fistful, and cut.

“And if you ever tell anybody what I’m about to tell you, I’ll deny it.”

It’s so good to see you, she kept saying. You too, he said. She led him around the house to the places she’d stored his things. They had broken up five months earlier, while still long distance.

Someone was saying his name, and that’s how he knew he was dead.

Jimmy’s jacket, mittens, and shirt were in a pile next to his frozen body.

Wishing he could change everything, knowing he can’t. That’s the blues.

The store was one of his last-ditch efforts to make a pile of money.

“I’m looking for a Mr. Miller,” he said. “I was told I might find him here.”

“Why don’t you call yourself Butterfly?” he said. “A pretty thing like you.”