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That they were not working class was listed as a problem for them, something they construed as a problem in order to reach the troubles-quota that families from that region were meant to meet.

He keeps a small box in the closet. The bottoms of hanging shirts cover the box like a hiding child.

My manager is waist-deep in God, which is where I want to be.

In the Apennines, he said. In the war, our patrol. A man of our unit took a shot to the gut.

He makes dinner while I sit at the two-top and watch. He lives in a house with three other people and a dog, a compost pile and various recycling bins. They hang their clothes on a line to dry, eat a lot of quinoa.

I have known chinamen. They are not all wheedling and gormless.

The wires had been fed into my father’s face. We stood around and watched him take it, and the white was gray really and I was older than I’d meant to be and there was no way now to stop.

It wasn’t easy to live in the woods, especially when we wanted the light on our heads. If only to know shoal and wave and dune.

One sticky afternoon, early in his marriage, Nat and his crew mates were gutting a tall-windowed lecture hall in the old chem building when, prying apart sections of lab table, he dislodged a long-hidden globule of mercury, which plopped into his bare hand.

My son kissed a pig at the petting zoo through the wire fence. I took him to the doctor because the pig’s nose was wet, and I’m a worrier.

“The telephone rang. I think it was already nightfall. The police were waiting for us outside my father’s building. They didn’t leave me alone with him.”

I speak of that home we made in the mountains before the big war, when things were done different.

God said, Let there be light.

And the young man standing before him wanted more than anything to ask, What’s light?

My mother and father told me that I had been born during a violent tornado and that they drove through the windy streets to the hospital

Well, so there’s life on the moon. Little spiderlike things, they say—a marvelous discovery.

I was made to determine the intentions of the letters. What were they getting at?

Years later, after she crashed her Corvette into a tree and there was nothing but blood and a pale worm of cartilege where her nose had been, Savannah would think about Mission Viejo…

WE WATCHED OUR FATHER take the jar out to the patio on the day we had been waiting for since he put the spider into it with its egg sac.

He had chafing and I’m not having luck with anything I’m using. We had agreed to meet where they know me. The server put drinks down.