My lifelong empathy for villains begins, of all places, with my father’s enthusiasm for a vindictive Huron chieftain. I was seven years old when my dad rented The Last of the Mohicans for the first time.
Certain lives are harder to tell. The mind spans a great distance: the worn shag carpet of his boyhood, where Jimmy would lay reading from the ragged set of plays; college nights playing chess, wrapped in the plaid robe he’d bought in town...
Sarah sits at the table by the open door, stacking coins, each squat pillar an allotment for their household. Rifle and wire, seed and sugar, tack and horseshoe, tobacco and flour, and—God forbid—the doctor. Sarah tells Thomas she’s...
Today I count the number of times I unlock my phone. I have opened my phone 473 times today. Is this a lot? Do other people count how many times they look at their phones? What does this mean? What does this say about me? Often, I unlock my...
They took their honeymoon a month before the shotgun wedding. A long weekend in the Poconos. His coworkers winked and goose-laughed and wished him luck when he told them he wouldn’t be there that Friday.
An ogreish middle-aged truck driver picks up Forrest and Little Tree on the side of the road. He is friendly enough at first, seems so despite looking kinda scary, especially around the mouth, a thing you don’t want to have to call a maw...
In an Illinois hospital, Luke Cullen, black-and-blue from punching himself in the face, lies in a bed with his hands strapped to the rails so he doesn’t attack the nurses or his mother, Jamie, whose entire upper body is covered with bite...
The only lock of hair I have ever mourned is a silky strand—a baby’s purest blond, saved from the first cut of a daughter’s hair & preserved with a photo under glass.
