Sometimes it helps to learn a relative has died a close relative you haven’t seen in years and didn’t plan to see again because

It’s Monday not Sunday and the frail lady in black is the only person in the pews. She walked in with

Through the nursery glass Carlos Montero peeks at Consuela, his twelfth, in the arms of a nurs… Pink as a peony with brilliant black hair,

When Bernie wakes at 6 a.m. there’s a piano on his chest and Erroll Garner’s playing “Mist… Sinatra’s on the headboard improvising lyrics

Mae mailed Christmas cards today, fewer again this year because death has made her address book a skeleton. She has a son in Russia

They’re in the kitchen, drinking coffee, the kids, in their fifties now, figuring out what to do about Dad who’s

A homeless man hangs himself from a tree at night in the city to close out the year. At dawn a passerby uses

The older I get the more I realiz… the importance of getting things d… before your mother announces anoth… assignment to roust me from my ham… As you know I’ve never been much

He slaughters his hamburger steak with a fork and a butter knife, massacres ringlets of onions again and again thumps catsup all over

Every once in awhile over the last 40 years Ralph wondered what might have happened to the guy who had moved in with the mother

After the doctor tells Ahmad his test results, Ahmad says he needs a new place to live. His tent’s in ruins, Ahmad says. His body will soon shake a final t…

I don’t know why my wife and I are up at four in the morning sitting in recliners drinking coff… staring at half-hour commercials claiming to cure everything

Thunder and lightning at first, as I understand it, and then the moon will split in half and disappear and the stars will go dark

Despite the digital holocaust of computers and cell phones, Newberry Library remains the Vatican of books with the right sounds,