I am a lady drone and a big eater. I eat for the tribe and I eat well. How I gorge, grinning back at my spare teeth on the wall, knowing the tribe depends on me! My chewing does not deviate from regulation

It is a runny night. Wind blows and the rain falls. I sit growling. My pad is in my hand and the stub of a pencil. Nothing comes. I eat Oreos. Each fattens me. Fat encases me. I will smother under lard at this rate. But they keep me from smoking. If I smoke my lungs will give out.

He put his foot on the rusted railway line among the nettles, thistles and cacti. In this way he managed to see over the rotted ends of the planks that had been part of the derelict station platform, and into the dark earth of the small garden shaded by the sycamore.

Agnes left me five years ago. Today is Good Friday. I went to church and looked at the vestments. The one day of the year when I go to church. I stare at the vestments and hope that they’ll enter my eyes, covering them. On Good Friday, it’s as if I am possessed. I know that the vestments last longer than a day. But as far as I’m concerned, they last a day.

Three times a year, the National Public Radio show Weekends on All Things Considered holds a fiction contest in which listeners from across the country submit stories that can be read aloud in less than three minutes.

My mother and I had decided that Bobo, with his lack of imagination, his logical, literal mind, would be best off operating and removing parts of other people—not a psychiatrist like his dad but a doctor nevertheless.

Oh! to be a real person, with a husband, and a household, and squealing dependents. Or at least to be involved in a sordid affair—in a narrative of some sort, in the sending up of shoots and buds.

A hunted animal will always try to run as far away as possible. The further it runs, the safer it feels. In 1985, after three years of running from the authorities in China, I finally headed for Tibet.

Sometimes I went during my lunch break into a big nursery across the street, a glass building full of plants and wet earth and feeling of cool dead sex. During this hour the same woman always watered the dark beds with a hose.

A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping … A Cherokee filled with bourbon … A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student …

And a family from Marshalltown who head–onned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri …