I put down the book. Once I saw where it was going, I couldn’t continue to follow the words to their inevitable conclusion. That’s new. I used to make a fetish of finishing every book I started. The writing was fine. Closing the book had nothing to do with the writing, just the story. It’s about a woman older than young, younger than old, who has been done wrong by the world.

Jen and I became a couple in 1988 during my third year teaching in Juneau, Alaska. She was living in a big rented house out on Auke Bay with a handful of other people, one of whom was a good friend of mine who’d been on the same coed soccer team with her. It was so long ago now, I don’t remember exactly how she and I first became romantic together.

I’ve always loved cemeteries, but my parents said I was tempting fate. Every time I cut through the graveyard to walk home from school, my mom would be waiting on the porch, hand covering her mouth as if she had held her breath since the bell rang. She somehow always knew the days I took the shortcut. Her pale face beckoned me inside quickly, lest a spirit should have followed me.

Hands grab and thrust me midair. At first, I flail, trying to gain traction, but realize its futile, her grip convincing. The overhead florescent is glaring. I don’t recognize this room. A dusty ceiling fan hums an awkward buzz, stacks of paperwork and torn Amazon boxes clutter the desk. They pace, shuffling towers of sweaters, pillows, and shoes. The jingle of a dog collar tests my concentration. Sugar?

Ashley moved to New Mexico because her mother’s relentless grief was driving her mad. It’d been six months since Dad died, and she couldn’t brush her teeth in the morning without hearing Mom’s moans drift down their lifeless hallways like a specter cursed to haunt her every waking breath. She tried to hide Dad’s pictures in the attic, but she saw his waxy corpse in every tear that slipped off Mom’s hollow cheeks.

Elizabeth Boyd was staring at the big yellow M beyond the windshield of her car. She’d been doing this for so long it had gone blurry and distorted, becoming a pair of small hills, a set of rabbit ears, a golden seagull the way her daughter, Caroline, used to draw them. Every single picture that child drew had birds of some kind, plus trees, flowers, a ragged strip of turquoise sky along the top.

The sound of the crowd reverberated backstage like a mallet roll on a timpani drum. Wim tried to calm his heartbeat with large gulps of air, but the sweat that slid down his spine let him know there was no calming this frazzle. Stage time was in less than ten minutes.

In May of 1889, Vincent van Gogh checks himself into an insane asylum after cutting off his left ear. At the same time very close by, a girl starts a diary.

I was born by the shore. Or, rather, I was assembled by the shore. The lady who put all my pieces together was an excellent doll maker, commissioned by an artist who knew exactly what he wanted: a toy cat for his son. My fur and eyes and ears were all there, as well as my long, fluffy tail, but the artist wanted me to look like the captain of a 17th-century sailing ship…

There’s no place on this ship where I can find complete dark. The floor panels light up beneath our feet as we walk. Overheads immediately come on when we enter a room. It took some getting used to, but once my eyes adjusted to the constant blue-white of the glowing floors, it’s become second nature, like living with a constant low-grade hangover

While visiting a city filled with canals, the name of which I forget, a gentleman thrust a copy of this slender pamphlet into my hands. He made off into the night. Strangers are often handing me bizarre objects and making off into the night. Perhaps they sense I am waiting for an event, that I am perched here with my binoculars, scanning for noteworthy material.

The nurse places the silicone face mask over my nose and mouth before aiming the light at my belly. The doctor is behind me, out of sight, washing his hands. Water hits the sink with deep hollow thuds and spatters. I imagine the sounds are my bare feet slapping on the floor as I jump off the table and flee down the hall.

When Adam was very young, he went skating on a pond in the woods with his older brother David. The pond was down a country lane surrounded by barren deciduous trees, naked winter forms, twisting and shaking in the wind under steely, hovering clouds. With a frigid snap in the air, the boys were swaddled in knits and coats.

The first time I saw him he was hanging on the back of a van wearing shorts and a pair of cowboy boots.
The van belonged to a rock band. I was in a pop band. We were both on tour. Musicians love playing but get bored touring, and they ease that boredom by thinking up ways of passing time.

The phone calls come three nights in a row, 2:30’sh, from different people, waking, scaring us to death. The black, landline rotary dial hammers its bells like a fire alarm.

The peace and quietness of a summer morning, by a lake near “Stinkin” Lincoln Maine, was shattered by the startling discharge of a Remington Model 1875 Single Action Army revolver.
My father’s loud cry and a string of bad words followed.

Everyone but Helmut was anxious. He sat by himself, as usual, at a small table in a corner of Café Stammtisch, calmly reading a newspaper. Germany Invades Rhineland! The headline took up half a page. He yawned.

At eighteen, she had changed her name to Persephone and tattooed a blooming flower with a leafy stem just below her collarbone, above the location of her heart. It was the size of an apple or a pomegranate, which was slightly too big for the location on her slender frame, but she had done it anyway.

Doreen’s son Alex wants to move back in with her. He’s in a bad way. He’s lost his job. He’s broken off with his girlfriend. Or she’s broken off with him. Whichever. He’s single now and temporarily unemployed. He needs a place to stay. He’s thirty-five years old.

When Billy Stang, four days on the road from upstate New York, forsook Interstate 80 for the two-lane at Ogallala and changed his trajectory from west to north, he was looking for failure. He found it twenty miles east of Alliance; but, since failure was his goal, he saw it as success.

A great blond vista of daffodils rose before us. They looked like stubble, the 5 P.M. stubble on the great big beard of Father Earth. Spring is here, each of them insisted. I was free.

It had to be nearly midnight by now. James couldn’t see his watch between the pouring rain and darkness, but he knew as he ran to Violet’s house that he was close to breaking his promise. Yet again.

Where would you like me to start?
I was born in 1836. I have an older brother, a younger sister, and a younger brother. Another sister passed away very young of the scarlet fever. We were all of us born on the farm that is now Henry’s, over by Ossian Corners.

A driving rain laced with hail pelted the limo’s roof- making conversation difficult, and so provided a sanctuary of silence as the uniformed driver chauffeured the grieving family out of the city to the hillside cemetery.
Sophia’s husband Joe sat next to the driver, although there was more than enough room in the back, where her son Anthony and his wife Mina sat on either side of her, as if she needed to be propped up like some helpless old lady.