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If we were being optimistic, we could say America is defined by its vast natural beauty, purpled mountains majesty, amber waves of grain, redwood forests, Gulf Stream waters, all that maudlin mus...

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“I’ve done your hair and makeup for a decade,” her tone wavered between bemusement and fear, “I would’ve noticed by now if you were a vampire.” “Because of the mirrors thing?” the rail-thin palli...

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He wasn’t always like this. He’d been a middle-class careerist, a suburban dad and husband. The manicured lawn, picket fence, two-car garage, the whole schmear. The good life. He wasn’t rich or p...

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Sarah and Rachel studied the rum cake together, fresh off its third overnight soak in a bath of boozed-up sauce. “Well,” Sarah asked, “do you think we did it right?” “We’ve baked a lot of cakes t...

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“I did it on purpose,” an old man in a rumpled windbreaker told a much younger man with a tape recorder and a notebook, in the back booth of Mudville’s Lazy Lunch Cafe, “I threw the damned game. ...

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Breaking news tonight, regarding the tragic train derailment in northern California, where they are still counting the dead: confirmation of the main suspect’s identity in the disaster that spewe...

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The problem with time-travel is not that it’s impossible. It’s certainly difficult, sure, but far from impossible. Throughout your entire history so far, a few dozen human beings have managed it ...

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“Life has a way of hollowing you out, if you’re not careful,” he intoned to a packed auditorium, faces rapt in honest attention, “you needn’t be a scarecrow for that to happen to you too.” Since ...

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I worry I’m nothing but a totem-pole of affectations, standing atop each other, in a trench-coat. Human-shaped at distance, but the closer you get, the more obvious it is I’m just an exaggeration...

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In a different life, and I mean in a very different life, the tale of his turn-around might have been inspirational, a small-but-touching arc from failure to redemption. One afternoon, he woke up...

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It wasn’t so much he woke up on the wrong side of the bed, we all do that time-to-time. It was which wrong side he awoke upon. He didn’t wake up on the right side or the left, he somehow woke up ...

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I cannot speculate as to whether Robert Johnson had a deal with The Devil. Those extraordinary successes and spectacular failures who die young certainly seem to have done as such but there’s a d...

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The funny thing about Christmas is, even though it’s supposed to be joyous, its most popular stories are about regret. Whether you’re personally marking Christ’s birth or lamp oils, winter solsti...

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Sure, Paul claimed they were simply having a wonderful Christmastime, but the facts just did not add up. I didn’t care he was a Beatle, that he was Sir Paul McCartney, that the man claiming this ...

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They’ve lived up there, in those hills, behind their high walls, behind their reinforcements, for as long as anyone can remember. The armed patrols at their periphery, the armored truck deliverie...

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It used to mean something to be pretty-good at something. It really did. To be a three-sport high school star, a county beauty queen, to be in the best band in your valley. It often meant a life ...

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She wouldn’t mind it so much, if it wasn’t for the damn birds. Some would call it a blessing, she came to know it as a curse, but all in all, it wouldn’t have been so bad if not for the birds. Sh...

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“So, why is everyone on here always hitting the pound key?” “What do you mean by that,” she’d known teaching her mother how to use Twitter would be difficult, she hadn’t known it’d be quite this ...

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“You can’t beat the devil by a nose,” the old man said, on the stoop where he sat every night for years, at least since I’d moved into the neighborhood, “that’s not how it works. If it’s even clo...

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My library gig and my love of baseball have one thing in common: they both bring my childhood back around when I least expect it. Explaining our local quartz exhibit by producing a “diamond” my f...

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Most technological advances become routine after a decade or two. It’s a quirk of our incredibly short lives. It needs to work like that for people to not go crazy. The wheel or radio, the intern...

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We must’ve looked like idiots up there in the Thruway overpass, shadows cast against those long nights and the longer highway beneath us and we probably were. Indistinct shapes pumping arms at sp...

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In the beginning, there was a light. A brilliant light. A hot searing light. An endless light. This light illuminated all, that all was everything. Everything was already there and that everythin...

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I minored in religion at college, this much can be agreed on, it says so in Syracuse University’s archives. This is at least a fact. Not a seminarian thing, of course, world religions, comparativ...

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The family dog Ollie is thirteen or fourteen, hard to know with rescues, and at this point in life is almost totally blind. It doesn’t get him down, other than doggiebetes, he’s hale and hearty f...

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