Melanie cried for hours the day a drunk driver ran over her dog a week after she had an abortion. She loved that dog so much she told her mother she knew

No Supper for a Year My wife looks out the kitchen wind… and tells me the starlings are bac… the same big flock as yesterday strolling around our yard

Before dawn Bill stoops under crimson leaves of the low-hanging Japanese Maple

It’s Ramadan and late one evening I walk by a mosque and hear little girls laughing on the sidewalk,

Ten years ago, when they were tykes just in their 70s, Melvin used to tell Emma eat your Wheaties

The late Justice Scalia, a strict conservative on the Supreme Court, would have voted in favor of prayer

I take my wife to dinner at a fancy place for us to talk about money because stocks have a virus and we should move

Officer Burks brings Max the Bloodhound into the alley and Max immediately strains at his leash.

I know this story to be true because I know Ruben and he wouldn’t lie even though Ruben and I have never met. He lives in Alabama in a hollow and I live in St. Louis. But that makes no ...

He’s supposed to be a feral cat and I’d never tell him otherwise but when my wife goes shopping he waits hours for her patiently on his haunches

Old Tim writes poetry now in his heaven of retirement. He’s had nice jobs over the years but swears retirement is better.

When Fred was a boy, he heard his… talk about Grandpa going to town d… to sell the bounty of his harvest. On his farm he had eggs, butter an… vegetables and meat. He’d buy suga…

Things are quiet here, a friend wr… in the first email of his long lif… Most mornings I drive to Gillson… sit and read beside the Lake. The waves are a symphony.