Open with: two men crushed to death in a campervan. Well ok, two men, potentially crushed to death in a campervan. Fate unconfirmed. And besides, it’s more like a caravan really, if we’re being pernickety. Which we are. So two men potentially crushed to death in a caravan. But perhaps we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s back
Gil’d kill for some coffee right now. Grains of sleep linger in his lashes. That trail of gross leaves is still there. He stares. Fuck fresh air, he has just decided. Not fresh air as a thing. Not fuck photosynthesis. Not fuck that. Fuck no. But as a judgment. A kind of putdown. That greener
I. Even now, Zoë can remember all the prices in the Melbourne milk bar that her parents owned. Paddle Pops were seven cents. Sunny Boys were three. Violet Crumbles and Smith’s Crinkle Cut chips both sold for five, the same price as the bus fare to her high school. In those days, two dollars a
Grenth Enterprise Academy Mr. Jackson’s Classroom (2nd floor) Tutor Time—14:45-15:05 Tuesday: Quiet Reading -a thin girl, some would call her pale, but people don’t tend to say that about students so well-endowed in PE even if it’s true. It’s not just that is the thing. Endowed, well, in just about every scholastic or athletic endeavour
Life was good: Domestic arrangement pleasant; kids and grandkids (for the moment) unworrisome; sky bright blue, wind zero. All of which was making her tense and restless. She knew the problem: She was addicted to fiction. She had been a compulsive reader from an early age, when she’d learned that if Nancy Drew and her
Michael felt like a cliché as he sat alone at the counter of a 24-hour diner. The time of night could best be described with the military designation, “oh-dark.” The only other people in the place were a waitress and two late-middle-aged women huddled close together in a corner booth. Michael didn’t usually drink coffee
I’m ushered out with the last of them, the stragglers at the FreshNet Local. There’s me, two men in long, tailored jackets carrying cardboard caddies full of corked bottles, and a tall, burly woman with a dog food sack under each arm. The blokes look like the sort who made fun of my car at
James hadn’t said a word to me since we left the Holland Tunnel heading south on I-95. We’d gone up to New York to see a friend’s band playing at a dingy club in the East Village and gotten in a fight. I’d fallen asleep when we left the city, but I woke up somewhere
I was eight months sober when I entered the contest. It was a benefit for children or refugees or some poor subsection of humanity which yearned for assistance. They wanted you to make a donation to enter, that was the catch. I gave five dollars. I suspected the more you gave, the better your chances
When I was 19, I secretly fell in love with a boy. He was 17. I first learned his body as I watched him walk across the campus green when he didn’t know I was looking—his curly dark hair, his camo jacket with all the pockets, his baggy jeans. I learned his face second, when
