This morning my eyes sit at the bottom of my face and my parched mouth gapes where my forehead should be. I slept in my best suit of clothes and now it is several shades of blue for some reason. I glance at my reflection in the kitchen window and I see a lot of green. I open the window and let the cool air caress my hot, cubist face. It is not green outside. It is dun and brown and dirty. So what is this green? My cat bumps my leg and purrs.

The Contessa cools herself with a pink silk fan as I climb her shoulders. I straddle her neck with my thighs in their green velvet leggings, and cover her right eye with my right hand while I raise a glass of ruby with my left and thus sinister hand and toast the purple phantasm mounting my shoulders, perhaps an incarnation of Bacchus generated by my psyche. I toast you, Bacchus! And I also toast Eros, who may be floating above Bacchus, shooting little arrows. Will this bring me misfortune? Will this bring me misfortune even if I am left-handed?

Interviewer: Thank you for agreeing to this. I know you give few interviews. Author: Seldom asked to. Interviewer: Let’s get right into it, then. Your work has been variously described as obscure and difficult, also superficial, amateurish, dilettantish, consoling, inspired, profound, provocative, humorless, and witty. How would you describe your work? Author: Widely ignored. Interviewer: That’s it? Two words? Author: Yes. That’s one word. Interviewer: I see this is going to be a challenge. Very well. Your work has been called both modern and post-modern.

Nathan stared at the half-eaten cake on the kitchen table. He was down four pounds from last month. But should he eat the whole cake? Despite his stomach hanging slightly over his shorts, Nathan thought he looked okay. That would change after the cake. I’ll go to the gym later. Burn it all off. Having settled on a plan, he ate more cake. Nathan’s driveway was made of tiny pebbles. He heard a crunching sound as tires rolled over the stones. He froze. There was still icing left. He closed the cake box, stuck it in the fridge.

Roman loves Angela and beer and chocolate cake. His love for Angela is immoderate. Her name is a sonnet that echoes within him. He adores Angela day and night and, if there were stretches of time that lay somewhere between the day and the night, he would adore her then as well. Roman’s love for beer and chocolate cake is also sincere and deeply felt. His definition of a perfect evening: six beers, dinner on the couch with Angela, a slab of chocolate cake, and a black-and-white movie, preferably from the 1930s, on television.

“Did I wake you?” “Becca? Is that you? Wake me? It’s eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning. Honey, I’m at work. Where are you? You sound a little distant.” “Maui. We arrived a few days ago.” “Uh huh. Well, it figures. I’m thinking about whether to eat the other half of my onion bagel and you’re in paradise wondering what time it is in the rest of the world. Okay, this is fair.” “I need to talk. Do you have a few minutes.” “What did Alan do now?” ‘Nothing. Nothing. It’s been great here.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Alma and Joel, students at Northeastern University and Boston College, respectively — undergraduate and graduate, respectively — were both aboard Amtrak on their way to Philadelphia and Baltimore, respectively, to spend the holiday with their respective families when three passenger cars derailed on the notoriously perilous curve at Frankford Junction killing two passengers and injuring fifty-one; yet, despite being in the second of the three cars, Alma and Joel suffered only minor scrapes so that he was able to carry injured people out of the overturned car and she to tend to them, a joint effort which made a bond that two years later eventuated in their marrying one another.

A backseat makeout sesh turns ecstatic when tennis gear becomes a language of desire.

Until Colleen walked into the gymnasium, my plan was to become the pickleball king of Baton Rouge. I was going to befriend, bepickle, and belove some rich but still well put together widow or divorcee, so that she would become a partner in this dream. I would present my passion for her and my passion for a neighborhood pub that looked out upon ten indoor courts, including one show court, in a tumble. I was running the Church of the Abundant Christ Pickleball Program. The only thing more popular around here was Jesus at Christmas.

“Kung Pao if you’re looking for men, teriyaki for women. Sweet and sour if you swing both ways.” Phoebe is idling in front of her KitchenAid stand mixer as it pummels fresh cookie dough into a creamy goo. “Not the little plastic hot sauce bottles,” she adds. “You’re looking for the bigger glass bottles.” She switches off the mixer and scoops a dollop of dough into her mouth, swallowing her finger to its hilt.

This is during our last childless vacation. Some might say, “So, your last vacation then?” I might reply “Ha,” or maybe “Funny.” This is on our tenth and final night in Nicaragua. And this is at a motel, close to the airport, in Managua. “What the fuck is going on? What the fuck?” This is what I hear soon after falling asleep.

Our ten-year-old saw video clips about snakes in Guam coming up through toilets, and now he would rather soil his pants than enter the bathroom. We point out that Guam is two thousand miles away. He just says, “Snakes are everywhere.” Of course, we immediately install very strict parental controls on the home network, but once he leaves the house, we cannot shield him from god knows what else is out there, so we make him an appointment at the Youth Counseling Center, and in the meantime we have provided adult diapers (size Small), the cost to be deducted from his allowance.

Monday. I wake at five when my trainer Sam knocks on the door. Today is what my husband calls “leg day”. We squat and swing kettlebells in our gym until I want to collapse and afterwards I meditate in the outdoor cedar sauna that my husband imported from Mississauga last winter. I don’t even want to name the price because it’s obscene.

The sun rises above a desert mountain range. Its golden glow banishes the shadows in front of two gas stations paralleling a lonely freeway. A man, still clinging to the horseshoe head of hair he has left, stoops under the empty garage door of one of the stations. He straightens up and breathes in the fresh morning air. A rusty red pickup truck and a white van approach from the distance.

Your handshake… Was it too tight? Your dad would say so. It was clammy. Salt-watery. Don’t think too much about the handshake — even if it wasn’t really a handshake since you were grabbing his limp flipper too tightly. You need this job. And not everyone gets past this point. He’s wearing a suit, the manatee. It’s tailored around his fat, gray neck.

We whip our car into the roundabout too fast, cut off a bus, wave sorry-sorry-sorry out the back window to the honking bus, and accelerate down the last exit curve. In the front seats, we argue. Bursts of words volley from the driver’s side to the passenger side and back again about which urgent care clinic is actually the closest and which one will actually be open at this time of the morning on Christmas Eve.

I was a single parent with a Corolla much older than my eight-year-old daughter and a one-semester contract that paid $9500 for teaching 240 students. Times were tough but with a car, a roof, a job, and my daughter, I counted myself lucky. Still, I worried about money. Though it wouldn’t do much to diminish my anxiety or augment the pantry, I took on a night course, Wednesdays from six to nine.

I’ve inherited my mother’s penchant for a finely dressed table. She liked to host Sunday dinners with coordinated plates and placemats and napkins folded into fans or geese or artfully tied through decorative rings. I don’t go quite that far but I do insist on cloth napkins, and I love a pretty tablecloth. When friends come over to my house to eat, especially with children, they glance around nervously seeking paper towels, but if they pause long enough to peruse the table they’ll see that all are welcome here, even amateur soup slurpers.

Christ help Me, Myself and I. So I yap at Myself. It’s not important to even take note of it because who am I to judge Me? Over and over and over again the same thoughts rain on Me. Hold out the helping hands as Me, Myself, and I cross the rainbow. We walked to the bar, Me, Myself and I.

It was midmorning. I wore my slippers, pajamas, and a bathrobe. I felt as if a dozen caterpillars were crawling up and down my back. My guest knocked on the door. I opened it. “Anderson!” he cried. “What an extraordinary thing you’ve done!” I smiled. “Every room I’ve ever set foot in, recreated as part of this house. No small feat of time or money.”

Joe’s one-bedroom apartment was his sanctuary. It always smelled of fresh coffee and was clean, and bright, and free of clutter. He was surrounded by his books, and his records, and his framed concert posters. He had achieved a certain aesthetic that pleased his soul. He had created a place to heal. It was a pendulum-swing reaction to his life before the divorce.

How Oliver got into the back yard was impossible to know because the security camera’s angle didn’t show the sliding glass door or its small plastic latch that Elodie made a point to never leave unlocked. Just a grainy and highly saturated view of the side of the house where the kitchen window was and the stone walkway cut the dense ground cover, the bare and skeletal branches of a fig tree, and the pool, kidney-bean shaped and covered by a cardinal blue tarp.

Ron is sitting in a chair reading the paper when I wander into his barber shop, tucked behind a thrift store that leaks the smell of old clothes into the carpeted hallway. Ron sees my sheepdog mop and wants to make it clear he’ll have to charge me extra, because otherwise people like me who only submit to a shearing every six months would take advantage of him.

Rudy and I were headed to the annual autumn puppet festival — Puppetalooza — in Stratford, Ontario for the weekend. I wasn’t that into puppets, but Rudy said he’d drive and pay for the hotel room, so I went along for company. He had elected to be a puppeteer in this life and if I wanted our friendship to continue, I had to respect that, and to a great degree I did.

Dividends Phosphate was sitting on the third floor of his spacious and well-appointed abode with his beloved Affenpinscher Rags Hoolihan curled at his feet, sipping from a glass of Chinese deer penis wine and reading from the various jottings and other personal writings collected in Elias Canetti’s The Human Province (written 1942 – 1972; translated 1978) when, through the east facing window on the other side of the room, he saw an individual in a brightly colored yellow windbreaker and pink compression shorts jogging down the sidewalk across the street.

The clatter of the pesky crickets on his front porch and in the basement of his farmhouse kept Harlan Becker awake… or more than likely it was the dread of the day to come that was getting to him. Whichever, he tossed and turned while Alyona slept soundly beside him. How can she sleep? he wondered. She knows what a son of a gun tomorrow’s gonna be.

I’m standing up on the bus holding a strap near the back. It’s too crowded to sit down anywhere. Old crones bickering in Polish, sleepy-eyed third-shifters, kids curdling the air with their whoops and screams. One beautiful young woman with tears on her cheeks, and some ancient, hairless fellow with a seeing eye dog. The dog, somehow, looks bored. Meanwhile, I’m coming from a job interview for this position as a Bible salesman.

I told the idiots I didn’t want to be their king. Don’t even think about voting for me, I told them. You want proof they deserve their name? They thought you voted on kings the way you voted on presidents. I did not try to disabuse them of the notion. It was no use. They’re ineducable, individually and as a group.

Karl saluted the picture of the original Karl and Karla hanging on the wall of his dressing room, then slumped into a tattered, leather chair. It was a ritual he acted out after every performance. He removed his top hat, laid it on the dressing table, and wondered how many times he would get to do this in the future. Circuses weren’t as popular as they used to be.

The sky never got bright enough to turn the streetlights off. 4:30 p.m., walking on the sidewalk littered with random shoveled chunks that had half-melted then refroze, he presses the button on his watch cap, and its attached spotlight shines down, reflecting off black ice, showing him the way. The day had been so short, it was an afterthought, already banished, forgotten.

Mrs. White was old and not just by the standards of sixth-graders. On the first day of the year, she announced that this would be her last. Sandy Moore joked that Mrs. White wasn’t really married, that she got her name from her hair. Mrs. White’s hair really was extraordinarily white, the color of icing on a wedding cake only fluffy, like cotton candy.

Mouse died today. Who could have known. But sometimes, many times, it happens this way. You get a call out of the blue. Hello? Hello? Palmer’s dead. Palmer who? Palmer Fish. Someone’s alive in the morning, someone you may have even forgotten existed, and then they’re dead. I didn’t know what to do. Who to call. What to report. How to dispose of the body.

Shit shit shit. I’m materializing, I’m materializing — I am late, I am racing, I am — woof — yes, here. I am HERE. Wait, where is… ? Oh god. Oh lord no. How could I space? How could I miss the motherfucking memo for the SECOND TIME this month? To: ALL CLOUDS. Subject Line: Saturday - Not An Us in the Sky.

Mark didn’t hate marriage and family, but he was falling out of love with it. He and Pamela married young. Nineteen years old young. Mark missed out on his oats-sowing opportunity. Not just experiencing other women, but just time to figure out who he was going to be when he grew up. And then, almost immediately, they had the twins, Simon and Marie, who were now impossible-to-live-with, entitled, all-knowing, eye-rolling, temper-tantruming, teenage terrors, who routinely left the dinner table without being excused.

Five years ago, Fred Nielsen drove his Honda into town and bought Doc Fitz’s practice from his widow Sylvia. The Doc had been gone just over a week. Nielsen took over the lease on the office, purchased all the equipment along with what the brokers call Goodwill, which pretty much means that Nielsen paid Sylvia something extra for keeping all Doc’s patients.