I was the kind of thirty year old who had only recently left adolescence behind. I was mostly a modern dancer. I rehearsed, I went to class. I worked the concession stand in an art-movie theater where actors and filmmakers ushered.

Uncle Ferris came down from Seattle to live with us in Oakland while he looked for a job. He'd been working for Boeing but had been fired for reasons he glossed over and glamorized in his favor. 

It was cold out, and I was early. The door was locked, so I sat on the front steps of the church, listening to the woman who took her piano lesson before me. She was good, better than I was, and the 

Didi Kinkaid and her three children by three fathers lived in a narrow pink and green trailer at the end of a rutted road in Paradise Hollow.

I know your publication is a newsworthy one, so I know you’re used to getting letters about newsworthy stuff. You’d normally get a letter about flesh-eating streptococcus or severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Start at the beginning, which is to say the edge, the perimeter, the shore. That’s where all but the babes of my bedrock start. And even those delivered atop my Mount Sinai like commandments

“My mother dumped my father for an ostrich farmer,” Vince said yesterday. We were in a semi-private room in the heart wing of Spohn Hospital. I lay on the other bed and said, Did she now?

He says he is a friend. He is no friend of mine. I have been saying that since I arrived here in Sarzana, to whoever will listen. I sleep on a thin wooden bed.

When I bought a parrot I assumed that the bird would develop a degree of autonomy in its use, or apparent use, of language, but it did not.

The hunt had been over astonishingly quick; years later, she would realize that the best hunts stretch out four or five weeks, and sometimes never result in a taking. But this one had ended in the first