Reprints

Lemon carved caverns in the fleshy pink parts of my mouth…

“I hate you,” says Jules.
“I hate, you, too,” I say. My co-workers don’t even blink. They’ve heard this before.

As he smoked, a red-shafted flicker hammered away at the top of a barren hemlock.

Johnny puts another whiskey in front of me. Except for him, me, and Petey, the bar’s empty. “You hear about that up in Wilmette?” he asks.

Stupid’s rising up, I see. Melting all the intellect. I before E, except after C, but that’s not how the alphabet goes.

Dig, dig, dig. That’s what I do. Dig the body as hard and as fast as I can, until it falls.

One day, when Rab­bit was tak­ing his med­ica­tions, Tig­ger bounced his car­rots to smithereens and Rab­bit had an idea. A won­der­ful, ter­ri­ble idea.

Henry and I had met at the hospital. He’d been forty years my senior, but we’d been in for precisely the same reason: kidney stones.

Jerry smoked secretly. The habit had formed some thirty years before in humid jungles, and he’d never kicked the craving nor the need to hide it.