“You get a passionate, hot-as-coals multi-hour makeout session. I mean the taste of each other eats you up. You never want to stop. You go until your jaw aches and you taste like each other. It swallows you up and … Read More

For show-and-tell I bring my pet rock, Earl, hidden in a shoebox. I wait my turn, clapping along halfheartedly every time Hector’s pug manages a trick. It does its final routine, shake/roll-over/play dead, and Mr. Mann calls on me. “You’re … Read More

My dad never talked to me, not really. Even when he wanted me to do something he found a way to say it through someone else. “Tell him to go split some wood. Make himself useful,” he’d say to Mom … Read More

It was one hundred and fifteen degrees when I pulled into town. There wasn’t so much as a dandelion tuft in the sky to proffer shade. The heat was immutable and torturous, the kind of heat that bakes you like … Read More

Dark all around. Downer downer colder colder. The smell at first six feet is rot. The smell of organs exposed.

Cherry liked watching the pretty bulbous eyes of the Santa Gertrudis in the kill chamber until they went blank.

Carrying my book, holding my place with my finger, I followed her into the run-down building next to the Drive-In.