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After the car door slammed— After the pain filled Don with lightning— After he saw the index and middle fingers of his right hand caught between the door and the door frame— After he pulled, but his fingers were trapped— After he tried the handle, but the door was locked— After he saw the keys…

She perfects her look on Myspace. The brightness and contrast in her photos are turned up to 70 percent so she looks like an animation most of the time. It’s the mid ’00s and she wears metallic cream eyeshadow, has red highlights in her layered hair, acrylics on her nails. Her belly button is pierced…

On our first date he brought me home to show his collection of bone records. He stood on a chair, pulled box after box from the top of a dusty wardrobe, talking about the music and how they approached doctors for old, discarded x-rays and then cut grooves into them using homemade lathes. I sat…

On the way to Bani Walid, a burned-out truck hulked in the middle of the road like the fossil of a tar-pit mastodon. It was a Libyan government ammunition carrier, incinerated by a coalition airstrike. The blackened ground glittered with broken glass, shrapnel and unexploded ordnance. Marwan skidded the car to a stop at the…

In the old Clatsop story, God pinched the mud of the north Oregon shore into mountains, carved rock to jagged crags. That’s how he cut his hands and his blood stained the flats of the north plains. Every autumn, as if remembering this event, the soil north and east of Astoria pushes forth blood-bright cranberries….

I started running into men, strangers, who looked like my brother. In the grocery store, at the bus stop. Fate warped the air like oil on water and then they’d appear at the edge of my vision, wearing the family nose. If I could get their attention, we’d talk. How are you? was how I…