Fiction

In heaven there is no beer. That’s why: There was a bar outside of Pigeon Forge, crawled back onto a flat space hanging off its mountain, where someone, seemingly inspired by great forces, had seen the fiction of her body, and in tribute rendered it fantastically, overwhelmingly, in fluorescent paints across the entirety of the…

Boys, men, girls, children, mothers, babies. You got to feed them. You always got to keep them fed. Winter summer. They always have to feel satisfied. Winter summer. But then you stop and ask: Where is the food going to come from? Because it’s never-ending, never-stopping. Where? Because your life is spent on feeding them…

I had a boyfriend my sophomore year of college who wanted to marry me. After we graduated, of course. We were both enrolled in small private schools in North Carolina, his for boys, mine for girls (we were not yet men and women). Unlike me, Bill already knew what he wanted to be: an orthopedic…

Back in the days when life was easy and you could walk down the street at night and not worry about anybody knocking you over the head with some blunt object and taking all of your pocket change, Miss Mamie Jamison, the neighborhood kids’ godmother who gave us money and candy and let us hide…

The poetry club in Jean’s neighborhood scheduled readings of new works every Wednesday in the basement of a popular restaurant, The Two Bruce Café. A surprising lot of people showed up regularly to hear and then critique the week’s artistic efforts, and the two lawyers named Bruce who owned the place felt rewarded because the…

“It’s not a cult,” Laura wrote. “The land is beautiful and the roads are smooth. In the fields there’s corn-tiny husks, green and perfect-shaped. God planted them. He built the roads. There’s so much I never understood.” “God doesn’t build roads,” I wrote back. “People do. Mexican workers and kids without college degrees. Come home…

Jana and I were in the bathtub on a drizzly afternoon, miles from anywhere. She was turning the hot water on and off again with her foot. I leaned against her, comparing legs. It made me think I was seven again, at the Albany Art Museum, copping a feel of those rich velvet cordons when…

When light came enough that the sky was blue, Ivy and Track had been driving for an hour already, the three girls and Tad in the back and Bella-Jean smug between them in the front seat, holding a paper bag to throw up in if she had to. Buzzy, the baby, lolled on Ivy's lap…

On the bus from Nashville to Lonoke, Arkansas, Jim Yankee Fish sits in back, in the star suite, with Bones, the bass player, while the star is up front doing business. The young and old singers all call Fish "Yank" when they see him in bars or on the road. Yank, they whisper, and he…