Each motel room had a set of French doors fac­ing the ocean and out­side the doors was a wood­en board­walk paint­ed gray. The man paid for one of these rooms for three nights in advance. He said he might stay longer and the desk clerk said that would not –more

SUBJECT:  LG French Door refrigerator
MODEL:  LFC21776ST
FEATURES: Stainless Steel fin­ish, LED –more

(from NWW archives)

Earl MacKenzie owned a movie ranch in Chatsworth, California. The place was a col­lec­tion of facades, all of them made of wood that had aged to the col­or of a jackrab­bit. The facades lined two blocks of a dusty street, and on them –more

I am not alone among writ­ers in pre­tend­ing that I have a “very visu­al sense” of what I’m writ­ing about.  Putting it this way sug­gests, even to me, that I have untapped tal­ents – except for the fact that I don’t real­ly have them.  My hus­band, –more

Her dreams last night had been red dreams, that was all she could say. Not red like blood, more like the red of the first tulips, a shock of col­or that blasts away the cold and the pale pas­tels of cro­cus­es and daf­fodils. Red dreams, trav­el­ing dreams. –more

Sometimes I stop read­ing a book, not because I do not like the book but because I like it far too much. There may be a sense that I resent the book hav­ing a cer­tain kind of author­i­ty which I want to defy, by ignor­ing it for a time, or chas­ing –more

When Donna brings home the exer­cise book from the library, her eight-year-old daugh­ter Tess says of the bare-stom­ached woman on the book’s cov­er, “Sexy! She’s got six-pack abs!”

Donna looks at the abs in ques­tion. What she sees is cater­pil­lar –more

Aquarium

“Think of it,” the moth­er said, “as if it were a secret, hid­den city underwater.”
“Think of it,” the moth­er said, “as if it were a mov­ing sculp­ture in time.”
The daugh­ter said, “I think of it as fish.”
***
–more

Certainly, I admired before I met
you, a per­son who was doing what I
could not imag­ine, and not for yourself
but for oth­ers, the way animals
adopt lost souls of anoth­er species.
Afterwards, I –more

My lit­tle sis­ter heard about the monks who slept in coffins the bet­ter to under­stand life so she asked my broth­er to make her one. He took some lum­ber from a half-fin­ished house down the street and in our garage instruct­ed my sis­ter in the use –more

This era will be remem­bered as our Vichy peri­od, that shad­owy era in France where the Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors sought to blend in with the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion, but were con­tin­u­ous­ly called out, and inter­ro­gat­ed, where­upon they fab­ri­cat­ed elab­o­rate denials –more

I went for a walk last night. A block in I heard some­thing odd near­by, looked down, found it was the new fam­i­ly dog, a recent res­cue, usu­al­ly too timid to even look at me. Who knows what she suf­fered in her pre­vi­ous life? But since yes­ter­day, since Monday, I’ve been feed­ing her table scraps. She’s been look­ing up when I call her name. And now there she was, keep­ing pace with me walk­ing the dark street. I was afraid she’d get hit by a car, but she paid no atten­tion to the cars or the oth­er dogs, just walked beside me, her lit­tle legs churn­ing. After a time we turned into the park, cut across the base­ball dia­mond where no chil­dren were play­ing, and made our way home. 

On the third morn­ing of the con­fer­ence I ducked into Whole Foods for break­fast and there she was again, the tall young barista with the two-toned hair, horn rimmed glass­es and that smile that could eat a dic­tio­nary all by itself. I pitched her my lat­te –more

Even before he got out of high school, Teedub told peo­ple he might as well be an orphan. Not for any atten­tion, just to heave the truth out there. Trying on the old man’s lan­guage, he’d say, “My daddy’s of no-count.” He didn’t need him, –more

On those nights when our par­ents fought, we crawled into their clos­et and closed the door. The muf­fled sen­sa­tion of dart­ed-words ham­mered at our backs as we dug through the rem­nants of our par­ents’ past lives. Yearbooks, and melt­ed can­dles, track batons –more

“Don’t tell your father,” Mom would say, fold­ing a lot­tery tick­et and slip­ping it into her purse. Poor people’s tax, Dad scoffed every time he spot­ted the Washington State Lottery’s “Dept. of Imagination” –more

Back when, I remem­ber com­ing across this sto­ry all the time (most like­ly the same year I found The Smiths and quit the entire state of Mississippi [and all I knew there] and moved to Denver to work as a hos­pi­tal order­ly like my hero, Denis Johnson) –more

Shiny things hung from the young man’s belt­loops, most notice­ably a sil­ver tape mea­sure, which he stretched between my door­ways. I love these coun­try homes, he said.

Walter laid the brick him­self, I announced. Walter cared for the lawn all those years, –more

Dandelion

Every year about this time
I thumb through a Rolodex
of names—my names, all
the pos­si­ble ones, everything
I’ve heard whis­pered or shouted
my way, in love or in panic,
in anger. There are nick­names,
–more