You see the surprise on your mother’s face that you’ve brought the white man home. Your mother is caught off-guard and becomes polite, not at all like with the others before.
Pleased to Meet You
Gas Station People – Editor’s Pick
Mandy was seeing Jackson after work, so she’d be feasting on a lunch of cigarettes and Diet Coke. She’d already painted her toes bright pink and shaved everything the way he liked it. She just had to last another eighteen hours and then he’d be on his way back to Tampa and she could eat as many cheeseburgers as she wanted.
Good Moses
Being dead was the easy part. That part made sense. It was living that was complicated.
Cork Oak – Editor’s Pick
She’s gonna be pissed when she wakes up. Realizes I went to the movies without her. But I was too tired to leave. Too tired even to look up movies and instead read the back of the wine label. Those labels either say very astute things or nothing at all, and that’s how you know you’re dealing with a good bottle or a so-so bottle. A good bottle will tell you what to expect in a universally agreed upon vocabulary: floral, levels of oak, that sort of thing, and suggest some pairing options, lamb or pate or crème brûlée. A so-so bottle will describe the wines in terms of ‘the texture of dreams’ or some BS made up to not be read at all, and if read, to not mean anything. A so-so bottle of wine makes no commitments.
Seasons Wither
“Back when I was young, you could work a job and have enough money to live on and to save. You work on the buses don’t you? Driving? Back in the day you would’ve had your own house off the back of that, and the missus would be able to stay at home with the little one, once it arrived.”
Fish Mandala
Ryan had decorated the dumpster with a bumper sticker of a line drawing of a fish. It's true that the simple fish had once been a secret way to let other Christians know you were Christian too, but when Ryan put the sticker there, he wasn’t trying to communicate anything about religion. He was saying, “Let’s go fishing.”