Here was my Wednesday ten o’clock: Robert James Coates, according to the file on my desk. But he refused to answer to that name, and at our first meeting, after the guard left us alone, insisted I call him Dog, which naturally I wouldn’t do. “All right, then, whatever, call me D,” he said agreeably,…
These two satisfied towns gaze at each other like old flames across Mobile Bay—handsome, hidebound Mobile with its lawyers and its cemeteries, and blithe Fairhope, pretty Fairhope, with its galleries and boutiques, Point Clear draped along the eastern shore like a string of pearls. Used to be, the right kind of Mobile family escaped to…
When Megan first moved to London, she lived in the top of a house at the top of Brixton Hill that seemed to her, all fresh and green and hopeful as she was, the very best place in the city. She had been staying in a thieves’ hostel near Victoria while she was looking for…
What they don’t seem to understand is that I like things the way they are. It’s become very fashionable for people to appear on these television shows, these so-called reality programs about people BURIED ALIVE, people DROWNING IN THEIR OWN POSSESSIONS, obese old men surrounded by expired, unrefrigerated yogurt containers and wisp-haired, rail-thin ladies with dead cats rotting underneath piles…
My mom says my dad had to work so hard he didn’t really notice how angry it made him. Nowadays he can’t watch the news without losing his temper. He comes from country people who hated the government going all the way back to the revolution. My mom says my dad’s grandfather used to talk…
After the death of his wife, Loring began giving away things for free. His sister-in-law worried it was some kind of “suicide thing,” as his brother Bill put it, which only showed how little they knew him. Loring wasn’t suicidal. If anything, in the four months since Gloria died, there was a new kind of…
Sadie’s lover, Marcus, called her every Thursday from Chicago as he drove to and from marriage counseling. (His wife drove separately, it goes without saying.) The end result of this was that it felt as if the three of them were in counseling together, but Sadie sort of liked that. The reason Marcus had to…
So when the doctor pulls the camera tube out of my rectum, the old joke comes to mind. “Wrecked ’em?” I say. “I slayed ’em!” The nurse lets herself out, carrying a fresh cut of me between two little panes of glass. The doctor rewards me with a snort, but I can see he’s only…
Out back of the motel, a man and a boy feed alligators in the dark. I can see them past the curtains. Past the paisley curtains and through the cracked and dirty pane of glass, I see them, like shadows, see them and the slow, casting motions they make. I see things leave their hands,…
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