“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.

“Remember not to call me uncle,” says the liar’s uncle as they both step off the bus, onto the dusty road leading into the drive-in.

Car broke down. Too much dust in the engine, I dunno. Wheels kept kicking up land all the way through California & eventually the car sputtered and died.

The first whispers I heard concerning Louis le Palme’s Ruins of the Sun arrived just hours before the film’s first and, as far as I have been able to determine, only screening.

In the pen I eat anything in front of me. I eat pellets and hay, I eat tails and dirt.

Everybody at her wife’s family reunion had too much to say about babies to talk to Wren.

Mike’s getting pretty good shots. The composition’s solid, with the street spinning out into the distant desert.

Greg took off his sweat-stained Blue Dicks hat and wiped his brow with his forearm. That goddamn song.

“Fuck,” the Con Artist said. The stack of fake IDs he’d been holding flew wild, into the dirt, lamination gleaming in the mid-morning sun.

Right before I caved and called Dad, his work called. They never do that. The woman’s voice was warm but strange, shaky at the end of sentences.

If the directions the boss gave me were correct, I was getting close to Los Suelos. The road before me devolved from a state highway to a county road of rutted macadam and faded thermoplastic road paint.

The truth is I don’t expect them to show up at all. I’m used to getting blown off. It’s basic as hell—New Kid Blues, et cetera, et cetera.

Bianca didn’t have time to stuff the hundred-dollar bill into her pocket before Luis came in to check her register. 

The preparations required ingredients she didn’t like clients to see. Most disliked what they saw.

Calvin started going to the diner as an escape. He wanted to avoid church, but his parents made him promise to acknowledge God, His presence, at least once a week.

I’ve been to more Blue Dicks games than anyone else in town, I bet. I don’t like baseball, but since Robert’s gone I’ve got time on my hands.

It was a short enough walk to the usual haunt. Too short, almost; certainly not long enough to forget the cows.

Took a single button. An hour later I started seeing big swirls of color, then feeling slightly nauseous.

I can’t believe this. I managed to do the only thing I didn’t want to do.

Los Suelos is a revelation. On the surface the town looks rundown. But there is a thrum beneath the crust here.

Lucinda woke up in darkness. There was some sort of noise, like a hum or maybe a very low tune coming from outside.

I got yelled at frequently for lying on the ground when I had a perfectly sturdy bed to sleep on.

The last thing she remembered was Abuela’s panic. It rang through her as Abuela’s soft hand pressed against her forehead.

Jagged machines whose ancient forms I can’t imagine claw at the blue expanse above us. A graveyard of metal monsters.