Billionaires

I've met two billionaires in my life. Both were on the same day, in the same room. It was in Silicon Valley, in one of those drab, eggshell-colored conference rooms, in one of those drab, two-story office buildings where crew-cut men in shirtsleeves may have once programmed microcontrollers for things like toaster ovens or SCUD missiles. Many of those men are dead now, and the buildings are occupied by a new generation of people, multi-gendered and clad in denim and Lululemon, who program algorithms to "monetize" our anxiety and mint yet more billionaires.

Strangers in Need

The boy, Denny, sat in a window booth of the diner. He stared out at the snow drifts along High Street, brooding about the blizzard that had closed the schools and most of the businesses in Kernsburg that morning. The street was empty except for a group of kids pulling sleds on their way to Bishop's Hill. 

Memorabilia

Colleen suggested that they sit near the window. The view of the courtyard was so pretty, she said, and there was such a nice breeze on these early summer afternoons.

The Last Day of the Season

It was still dark outside when my father woke me.

"Hey, let's catch some fish," he said.

Medicine

When I got home from work, Jerry was sitting in the kitchen with his dead wife's engagement ring and a pint of Jim Beam on the table. He was turning the ring on his pinky finger and studying its sparkling reflection against the bay window, which had become a black mirror against the autumn night. 

Reunion

I was checking in to a hotel in Washington when I noticed my father in the lobby. He was dragging a trash barrel on wheels behind him and emptying waste baskets into it as he passed them. He looked thin and darkly suntanned and was dressed in green work clothes bunched around the waist under his belt.

Eastern Shore

Lianne takes the ham casserole and garlic bread out of the oven while I nibble on pretzel sticks and wonder when she'll ask Gene for the money. He's standing beside me, pouring the ginger ale.

The Brouwer House

I rented the house right after my first wife and I separated. More accurately, I rented it after making a mess of both our lives, but that is a longer story.

Jeep

Her name was Jesse, but for as long as he could remember everyone called her Jeep. She had always been a big person, even as a girl. She wasn't fat, or overly muscular, she was simply...big. And she wasn’t a freak. Hers was not a grotesque bigness or a matter of odd proportions. In fact, many people considered Jeep quite nicely proportioned.

Keep Coming Back

They milled around the old church hall sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups. Fluorescent light filled the room, the floorboards creaked as more people arrived unwrapping scarves, tucking hats and gloves into coat sleeves, draping the coats over metal folding chairs. They were young and old, women and men, every race, every social class.

Foolish

Carol and the therapist sat facing each other. The room was bright, furnished with pieces of cherry and leather, a rainbow rug covering the floor. A wall of windows overlooked the woods behind the building. Across from the windows, three large framed portraits hung on the  wall, studio portraits of young girls with yellow and blue ribbons in their hair.

Rose

The lawyer flipped through the thick stack of papers to each little yellow Post-It note, one after another, showing her where to sign or initial. She didn't read a single word, only signed, and after eleven signatures she stopped counting. She thought she might cry, sitting there in a blandly decorated law office next to a supermarket, (her friend had called it "a divorce mill"), signing away fourteen years of her life. But she didn’t cry, just kept doing as she was told, signing and initialing.

Writing "What Happened"

I drafted this story in 2013 after seeing an illustration by the artist Eric Petersen on Tumblr: I was so struck by the strange beauty of the image, with its bold colors and deep-focus perspective. As I looked at it more closely, I wondered why these people were all looking…

What Happened

When the salesman arrived home, he tried to explain the murder to his wife.