Jimmy R. Calhoun stepped out of the bodega on 72nd Street while listening to “Creep,” by Radiohead through his earbuds. The Widow Finkelstein, coming from his left, stumbled as her foot knocked into his. The Widower Roth, coming from the other side, bumped his shoulder into Jimmy’s shoulder and then thrust an arm against the store’s awning to steady himself.

In the aftermath, Jimmy turned first one way, where the Widow Finkelstein was windmilling her arms and pulling her torso back upright after a worrisome dip, and then the other, where the Widower Roth was gasping for breath. “Sorry,” Jimmy said.

“‘Sorry?’ Do you know what that word means?”

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My son plans a violent act. My girlfriend says she’s thinking of moving out, at least until my son’s attitude improves, and if Heidi suspects violence, something more than a fifteen-year-old’s petulance, I know she’ll leave.

Last August, when Jacob’s mother sent him here, to this Idaho ski town where she birthed him, she declared he needed a change of scene. In new snow, Rachel said, a sapling breathes. Such koan-like utterances pepper Rachel’s speech, leftovers from when she studied to become a Buddhist nun, although in this, as in motherhood, Rachel only half-completed the job. Though what Rachel half-completed, I never began. I intend to make amends.

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Karl closed the door of the old Cat backhoe behind him, turned around and locked it, and then put the key in his jeans pocket. Before stepping down, he looked back at what he’d done over the last two hours. Eight perfectly squared rectangular gaps pitted the sod stretching toward the evening’s purple-blue that sat on the horizon like sediment from the sky.

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by Erica Gingerich Halloween my sophomore year of university was one of those scintillating and gloriously bright Midwest fall days that had you humming Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Puff the Magic Dragon”—the line where he was frolicking in the autumn mist and all that. You so GOT that song on days like these. Grooving along […]

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At the vet’s I did the usual waiting in the waiting room. Mickey sat on my lap, growling when other dogs got too close. I thought about how I would tell my son—if Mickey was really on his last lap. The kid loved the dog. He seemed to have some primordial memory of when we’d all lived together, as if it were some lost golden age—and seeing the dog gave him access to that lost age again. And, beside that, the dog was the one thing I had over his mother. She’d never let him get another dog. At my house, at least there was a dog. He hated me, but at least there was a dog.

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