The Austin Zoo had been closed for an hour, but Josie was still waiting for her boyfriend in its oblong parking lot. She sat on her truck’s tailgate, watching the sky darken above the mesquite that cloistered the property. The air was sharp...
Nyibol had always breathed noisily when she had a cold. She would whistle through one nostril and wake up furious with her own little body, slapping the pillow, then glare at me until I laughed.
“Lady Luck,” Uncle Bob said after I finished a litany of complaints about my school. “Just you wait. She’ll sneak up with a couple of aces when all you’re expecting is another losing hand.” It was Sunday dinner, roast beef, which Bob never...
Sarah sits at the table by the open door, stacking coins, each squat pillar an allotment for their household. Rifle and wire, seed and sugar, tack and horseshoe, tobacco and flour, and—God forbid—the doctor. Sarah tells Thomas she’s...
Today I count the number of times I unlock my phone. I have opened my phone 473 times today. Is this a lot? Do other people count how many times they look at their phones? What does this mean? What does this say about me? Often, I unlock my...
Certain lives are harder to tell. The mind spans a great distance: the worn shag carpet of his boyhood, where Jimmy would lay reading from the ragged set of plays; college nights playing chess, wrapped in the plaid robe he’d bought in town...
They took their honeymoon a month before the shotgun wedding. A long weekend in the Poconos. His coworkers winked and goose-laughed and wished him luck when he told them he wouldn’t be there that Friday.
An ogreish middle-aged truck driver picks up Forrest and Little Tree on the side of the road. He is friendly enough at first, seems so despite looking kinda scary, especially around the mouth, a thing you don’t want to have to call a maw...
The first thing I must tell you is that all three sisters are born on the same day in December. Every other winter, without fail, out they come, like a foot stamped three times in the dark.
