Stories

Lorna was like a sculpture carved by some Greek out of marble.

He told his father he wanted to make art pictures, not lousy mobster stuff.

The moths were the things that invaded, like a bad man’s touch.

At night the wildfire swelled the blurred interior like a lung of light.

You’re too far from where I sit to admire your finery up close.

Ann Beattie in a wonderful reading of her story “Find and Replace."

We roasted mastodons. Designed skewers, ovens, steampits.

Less magic, less defense, more speed, more stealth.

Then bullet strikes were spiderwebbing the windshield.

There’s anger in the sound of a V-8 engine that puts me at ease.

You’d probably prefer to sneak back into me very still, swollen.

I blush whenever that room in Ensenada comes to mind.

The tension between words and actions, in a six-word story.

I’d have guessed the winter this way, every bitter plum already singing.

I know exactly what to do when Papa has a seizure in the middle of the night.

Theirs was a free fall that went on and on. If it’s time to fall, let’s fall.

The jealous Othello, ready for murder, was transformed into a school-boy.

I’m alive, Sarah thinks, the slam of his look going all the way in.

By the kitchen sink, my aunt held a fish as if holding the Holy Body.

Lure, yes, you would know how to catch and clean such a thing.

The dugout boats kissing the shoreline have ferried us into open markets. Girl, you call me in time, where this too can be forgotten. The hands that made them asking for more things in dim light.

The social-media world was ablaze with his daughter’s bagunça.

Fishing with Dad guaranteed two days of just us and made me special.

Welcome to my bed. I have these two beers, do you want them?

The pupils are toothpicks. The lake is a sky with a circle beneath.

Everything hung in perfect balance. Light and dark, heaven and hell.

I'll pick a black card of luck for you: star, pinkmoon, mirror, ostrich eye.

I’m going to save up against the flood and stagger to carry nothing.