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The first stick grew from my belly after my third husband died. Not all my husbands died. Just the third one...

We're standing on the sidewalk outside Shirley's apartment. Jimmy says it'll be the usual. Five minutes in-n-out...

The day that Elmo came to visit the Pentagon was the same day that the women from the Office of Human Capital Initiatives put on a fashion show, which also ended up being the day I had an anxiety attack and wore my government-issued gas mask for the first time...

I won my almost-husband in a game of poker...

We had just gone on first break when Gerald asked me if I thought you should take it seriously if someone you knew said she was going to kill herself...

She couldn't choose between one balloon planet or two. Saturn with its lush rings beckoned to her like a siren in the sea, but she pitied Uranus a bit because it wasn't much to look at and had an unfortunate name...

My father was an east coast Jew who headed west out of desperation and a romantic notion of finding himself by wandering amongst ranchers and riflemen...

Again the game is Run from Rebecca. It's where they chase her around the playground and scream out her name, and run away as soon as she turns on them. Run from Rebecca, they run and they scream...

Sometimes, I visit my wife's gallery showing just to listen to her pre-recorded mission statement...

They were not who Milwaukee's meat-lovers expected to find behind the counter of the new butcher shop...

I heard wearing black to weddings was inauspicious, so that must have been why I was vomiting into the hotel's hydrangea bush while my brother kissed his bride five stories above...

Soon I will be left behind. This I know. This I see.

The tree was the only thing Salvador could see before the horizon. It was a relief to the eye in the desert pitted with craters and rocks...

Aimee knew that being the executor of her mother's will was a bad idea from the get-go...

I'm waiting for you in Paris. Waiting in the Champ de Mars, the park next to the Eiffel Tower. Standing on a patch of grass, wearing a tuxedo, and holding flowers...

Hey Margie, I sent a check to St. Cecilia's yesterday. I thought you should know. I don't have your email or anything, so I hope you and your lawyer husband still live in that same McMansion where you had the reception for the reunion.

There are no practice rooms in the old band building, so they use Mr. Hammond's office for private lessons, the walls cushioned with foam to dampen the noise...

There is nothing like the smell of Santeria. It is a distinct smell that jolts me into my body the second I find myself enveloped in it: one that suggests cleanliness—in every respect—but with a little magic mixed in...

I need a creature in my life, so today I went to the pet store. There were puppies (too jumpy) and cats (too aloof) and guinea pigs (too smelly). There was a red-tailed boa, and she was it...

They were on a dirt road travelling south. Rick was driving fast, and the RV kicked up whole atmospheres of dust behind them...

I'm remembering this: grownups do not like Dear Boy...

"King," my son calls out to me. We are on an old Greyhound bus that rocks back and forth through America like an unsteady amusement park ride...

At this point it was very hot. On the way out the stretcher popped one of the balloons. If it hadn't been startling no one would have noticed. Under the circumstances no one cared...

I noticed her heel-click-hip-twist hourglass silhouette as we walked toward bright light at the end of a long corridor between Terminal B and Terminal C...

We were waiting for rain the day my sister stopped talking...

The film was about making a drama, which was about making a thriller, which was about making a comedy about the making of a horror flick...

You tear away your human suit. To free the animal. So it will breathe, and breed...

With Karli's savings (evaporating like water on hot concrete), we're renting an empty lot jammed between a barbecue place and a mechanic's yard on a hardscrabble block of West Oakland...

The headache never faded. First dip to the knee and a hammer struck anvil behind my eyes...

Two-year-old Lulu tottered on the end of the diving board, her red tutu quivering as she backed away from the brown and gold rattlesnake...

The artist living in Valerie's ribcage would like to know if she could please try to tone it down with the rough sex...

Their hair was smoking. That's what the kid said. Our eager faces crowded around him, marijuana hovered just above the bleachers...

You've thought about jumping...

I got into the Sackman Street Boys gang by a fluke, thanks to Deanna Miller, who found a rusty razor blade in the courtyard of our building and tested it out on the fleshy part of my arm...

I was in the backyard filling one of the bird feeders with my daughter when our new neighbor knocked on our fence...

When I found out I was sick I was happy. I mean, I was depressed for a couple of weeks, but then I started to look on the bright side...

Georgie is twelve and doesn't give a...

This is a work of fiction. This is not a work of fiction...

At the airport I have to make a phone call for someone to pick me up because my mother is at the hospital with my father, who has had a stroke...

When I told Daniel the lime margarita tasted like a menthol cigarette, he asked me what that even meant. "Astringent. Sharp. Antiseptic." ...

In a split second they become so obvious, the two things that I realize. The first is that I'm pregnant, the second is that I don't know how it happened...

Marty Kepler sat hunched over the table all afternoon. Like the rest of the furniture in his temporary home, the table was cheap, its chairs mismatched. He wondered what Fritjof would have made of it all, of him, working on one of his "sad little stories" in the dining room of the famous writer's childhood home...

I wanted to cook something simple and not necessarily typical of Colombian cuisine for the occasion: maybe pasta pomodoro or beef with asparagus. As soon as I heard my dad was being released from prison, I bought a ticket to Colombia and rented an apartment so we could spend some time together...

"It wasn't the mall," I hear Jessica say. "He left her at a Safeway. Tied up in the trunk of her car." ...

The first couple of days back on land after a voyage were always difficult for Viktor Krysanov. He had never suffered from seasickness, even when he was a student at the Marine Academy...

Brown. Everything brown. Brown is the weight and hue of this city...

When I saw him standing six-foot-six in the sun-light glare of the Texarkana Greyhound station, I thought, That must be how other people see me, so tall...

There are many things I do like. The way the light passes through our blinds in the summer in perfect slits. The way the light, like today, in the winter, pours through the folds of our heavy drapes...

Because you've made me watch The Godfather eighteen times but won't watch Gone with the Wind with me...

Lola, I called her. Her skin milky blue, her tiny fist curled around my hands. They let me hold her for a minute, let me bury my head into her yeasty body, still warm...

It was easier to get from one side of the day to the other, Erin had decided, if you gave it a colon, or specifically, something after the colon...

We were dressed to match the décor, pink peonies floating in glass bowls of water and gold glitter...

The line of wash crackles in the freezing salt wind. "Stiff as boards," Ma says as she unpins the ice-encrusted flannel shirts, letting them fall like planks of cedar into the old tin bath she uses as a laundry basket...

August and miserably hot. Unbearable, sweltering heat. The air's too thick to breathe, never mind prance around in a ratty wig and face paint...

His sister traced the first words of the Quran with her soft fingertip. The boy held the book while she held Manel, rocking the infant in her small arms...

As boys, Charlie Coughlin and Mike Benton knelt beside parked c­ars on the neighborhood's street curbs to twist small caps, no bigger than a pinky finger, off of tire valves and pocket them...

Roots probes a husband's jealousy.

Kidnapping the old woman taught me far more than the respectable methods of Maximilian Delphinius Berlitz ever could. Kidnapping her goat was a boon I couldn't have foreseen...

Winter came late to Deep Meadow Bog the year Mr. Barnes took sick. December never really happened...

I know that they will appreciate seeing the hydrangeas in the window before they step through the door. I trim their stems over the kitchen sink and fluff their leaves out of the top of the vase...

I loved your book, so romantic and tender. Bittersweet, I think that's the right word. It's plain as day you know desire...

I had to walk away. The stairs would only ever go up and up and up...

It began snowing in the night. By morning twenty-eight inches had fallen, and it still snowed...

His decline is gradual, but a mother knows. Giant teddy bear hugs become limp, and the child turns his head, leaving a parent's kiss floundering fishlike in the air...

A girl finds the ghosts of jellyfish on a street corner.