Just Can't Win

"I can't believe you said that, you're such an asshole," Anthony's girlfriend snaps, looking around the crowded coffee house to make sure no one heard.


"Oh come on, when the UN left Darfur, they weren't on the road for five minutes before they heard gunfire. Entire villages huddle with their families in hospitals, praying their pink little palms off, and they're still hacked apart with machetes like prime rib and dumped into the rivers by the thousands. Sweetie, not even Africans like niggers."

Folly

Father Connor slips his shoes off in the front hall, ready for a drink, but God is waiting for him in the kitchen. He grabs the preacher by the front of his shirt, and slams him into the refrigerator, sending magnets of cute aphorisms scrawled in calligraphy clattering to the floor.

In the saccharine waft of a time release air freshener, God leans close and whispers,"When you were a kid you told your friends that aliens had landed in your neighborhood, and they would start to see them too, just to be a part of something exciting. Don't you ever, ever, get up on that podium and talk about me like that again."

Probability

The man and his stepson try their damnedest to live, but the fire has been set deliberately. The fluid tongues of heat lap across all of their possible exits, digesting their air and possessions.

Drew stands in the yard waiting for the police, wondering, should he have done it this way. These people would have screamed the same at gunpoint or in the river, direly, as if they were going to miss something special.

Unlisted

Linda bursts into the bathroom and grabs her little son by the arm, letting his toothbrush clatter into the sink behind them. She moves swiftly and without a word, followed by the desperate pattering of tiny feet against the fluffy carpet. As they run, Linda ducks into each room to flick light switches and yank lamps from the wall, telling her boy to be quiet, to just come with mommy.

Finally she kneels behind her son in the cimmerian hush of his bedroom, hand clamped over his mouth until downstairs the relentless thunder of fists against their front door fades.

For a Reason

Adrian stands at the top of the staircase in his house, and lets the round glass paperweight slip from his hand. There is a thud as it strikes the hardwood, and rolls almost lazily down each step until it stops at the bottom on the air conditioning vent. He calls his girlfriend right after and dumps her, then goes out the next day and buys a pack of cigarettes and all the books and dorky hats he can afford.

With no God comes no worries.

Quality Time

There are certain moments or feelings that, being a blissfully married millionaire, go unexplored in my life. Sometimes I have to play little games with myself, like throwing baseballs through my imported windows or not paying my bills until the electricity gets shut off.

"Oh, don't use that bathroom, honey, I seem to have shot the toilet to bits!

...

Want to go down to the hardware store with me and help me pick out a new one?"

Sunday Best

Hank all but struts up to God, feeling the exhilaration of the Spirit warm him. Always he has served in the ministry of his savior, preaching the Word, letting people ahead of him in traffic, and he knows that the Lord will surely praise him for the life he led.

The Creator shifts in His seat a little, clearly He has been waiting for this.

"Hank," He says,"do you, perchance, remember that time in the seventh grade when your mom caught you in the bathroom getting your jollies with a grilled cheese sandwich?"

The Little Things

Bueford loves applesauce cake. He loves it like vegans love saying things they haven't thought about. Loves it like fat girls love getting their hair braided. Adores it so much, he's sort of okay with having herpes.

The New World

It's easy to see how painfully disappointed Declan is, sketching on an Applebee's napkin the floor plan of the place he is going to build for people to go to when they realize that sex gets boring, even when it's with with the pretty girls who have collagen-filled lips and seemingly no fear of having to wear adult diapers thirty years prematurely or with the chiseled boys who are dumber than wheelbarrow handles. Megan Fox, Mariah Carey, Lady GaGa, all siren arbiters of the biologically entrenched, illusory distraction, but Declan will invent a utopian harbor to house those left disillusioned in its wake.

There's only one problem: what exactly could Declan offer those people?

It's like when he outgrew the Ninja Turtles and, looking out upon a sprawling frontier of empty time, had no recollection of how it was filled before.

Contentment

Madison is a kind of tired that goes all the way through, and drunk by herself while outside it snows to beat hell. She went to the Cheesecake Factory this afternoon, the one up in Easton, to have lunch with her stepfather. While he talked and talked about her mother, she gazed over his shoulder at a man sitting near the entrance looking lonely and so perfect. It occurs to Madison that perhaps she should be worried about finding a man like that for herself instead of wondering whether or not she has enough energy to play Wii and masturbate in the same evening.

Fury

Every morning I wake up alone and see a machine, so vast and intricate. I watch it malfunction, parts added years ago going bad and too deep inside to change. Even if we wanted to, today, could we stop and start over? Maybe the best I can do now is let gears have my body, and hope that, catching on my bones, they are the ones that let the whole thing keep running.

Divine Providence

"We all used to believe in You, you know," I say in Wal Mart as God switches the pregnancy tests with the thermometers,"We carved an angel out of this enormous red oak at the city limits, then lightning struck the head off, and someone put an exercise ball with this ridiculous smiley face sharpied on in place of it. That pretty much did everyone in."

God frowns slightly, pushing a thumbtack through boxes of Trojans and hanging them on the racks beside the Hannah Montana clothing line.

"Well...I thought it was funny," He says.

Gatherings

Martha May stands by the long table of food in the community building, holding her camera, shouting,"Everybody say 'Papaw is a stinky pants!'"

Cousin Ferris spikes his low ball glass into the off-white tile, scattering jagged shards and spackling the disposable tablecloths with Jim Beam.

"It's grandfather!" he barks. "Grand-fa-ther, you miserable sputtering shitcunt."

Missing

Driving off of the bridge, past the concrete towers making clouds in the distance, Sandra slams on her brakes at an intersection.

"Jesus," she says,"They really need to put a sign here."

In the back seat, her little boy is puzzled.

"Mommy, where do they keep all the things that should be there?"

Mistakes

"Honey, relax, things are getting better every day," Angelo's girlfriend says,"We're learning from the mistakes of our parents, and we will be okay. We know about the diseases. We know about the poor."

Angelo looks out the window and doesn't tell her about driving around at 3AM, about all the bedroom lights still on.

Damn It, Anyway

I really don't know how to tell you what an unlucky person Michael is. His father died on the way to a family reunion. His best friend survived prostate cancer, only to be killed by a heart attack. He likes a girl.

Initiative

Gregory is worried that he may become a child molester. When the girls get out of the junior high beside the bakery where he works, walking across the crosswalk in their short skirts and low cut tops, what they would look like naked just pops into his head before he can do a thing about it. He wonders what is stopping him from pulling up beside a group of them one day, promising them alcohol, bringing the takers back to his house. Then again, he also wonders what is stopping him from going back to school and getting this weight off.

Confidence is Everything

The key is don't be nervous. Open a cooler or two, pick up an energy drink. Ask the guy behind the counter how the pink grapefruit Tic Tacs are and toss a pack of them onto the counter. This way, when you reach for your wallet, he isn't ready for the gun.

Guess and Check

When a doctor says something like "You only have about a month to live," how do they calculate that exactly? Is it just a guess or from experience, or maybe they have a Facebook quiz-like thing that spits out a number when they bubble in my information? I marked the date on the calendar, but I think you, your mother and I should go down to the Ruby Tuesday the night before, just in case. Anyway, this isn't a very good bedtime story, is it.

Another American Legend

There was no Rosa Parks. There was no Harriet Tubman. No Maya Angelou.

There was just James Earl Jones, cross-dressing in his time machine.

After

I don’t know what to do with our big house on the hill. The steep climb up the driveway seems longer than it was before. The pavement looks more cracked, like a sea of shifting plates instead of a long contiguous strip to drive up. It’s a box, a six thousand square foot leviathan of sprawling brick and bay windows.

At night I can almost feel the tendrils of ivy swallowing it, squeezing it, daring it to crumble. I was never the one who kept the wood spiders from taking over the back porch. I never figured out how to keep the deer from eating all of our flowers. What do I do when it starts raining and water trickles through the walls in the basement? Where do I need to kick the furnace to get it working again? The gutters are too high. It will always be too dark.

All that space.

Just something to get in the way when I want to see the stars.