At least he wasn’t drinking too much. I set the plate of mini-pizzas on the coffee table. It was only his second rum and Coke, a huge improvement over last time. My husband and I earlier passed the bong with him. Getting stoned dulled Cullen’s agitation. His last visit was a disaster. Billy and I [...]

On Thursdays you play racquetball with Jim at the university’s recreation center, taking advantage of staff rates because you both do the cleaning, pushing brooms and mops across acres of hard tile floors well after classes end, emptying trash bins and snatching stray pencils and lost notebooks and misplaced earphones, anything the students leave behind, [...]

“Scarborough Fair” Anne to Emily Dear Emily, I really wish you would come and visit me here. I need to be with someone familiar. I have been to the seaside again today to collect more pebbles and to clear my thoughts. There is not much chance for the latter. The Fair is still on for [...]

Luisa did not scream as she hurled forward, somersaulted, and then plummeted towards the backs of two hulking guys leaping down the escalator with Olympian ease. At the top of the stairs just as she was about to grip the handrail, they had knocked against her with such force that she seemed lifted out of [...]

1 My friend Evan is acting in a film set in Sarajevo. In it, his character reaches a point of despair and becomes a petty thief, taking a flashlight and smashing through a jewelry store window in an industrial complex containing both a church and a McDonald’s. His accomplice, a young towheaded hood, pressures him [...]

My sister’s cancer surgery is coming up, and I hate thinking about this while I eat my oatmeal with flax and fruit, and I’m thinking about smoking a cigarette for the first time since, well, can’t even remember, and I hate that thinking about something I hate to think about makes me think of something [...]

The sound of rock cracking, of timbers snapping like celery stalks and the unmuted avalanche, concentrated into one sonic roar down the channel of the mine shaft, these were not recorded. Nor was any video taken of the men’s faces down below, their mustaches gaping over black-hole mouths, their eyes weak with horror. The other [...]

I was at the baggage claim when Jim called with the unfortunate news. “Guatemala is closed,” he said, voice fluttering in two. A baby was waiting for them in La Esperanza, but the other day a trafficking ring had been exposed; the orphans, it turned out, weren’t really orphans. When I visited six months earlier—a [...]

That summer I was trying to keep a low profile. I was trying to walk the straight line between jail and unemployment. I was too familiar with both and didn’t want slide either direction and my luck was holding. I had a job. I had an apartment and a roommate who didn’t ask too many [...]