Sublime

No mates exist for countless miles around, and a chestnut, though both male and female, will not serve itself.

The fat man, though, was still staring at the spot where the ball gone into the trees, like he was offering it one last chance to give itself up and come out, and then without any warning he wheeled around and sent the club in there too, a sound vomiting up out of him that wasn’t in any Reader’s Digest, or any dictionary, that didn’t have letters

Never answer a suspect’s questions, Bill used to say. They answer yours.

watching bored teenage jerk-offs hack apart someone you used to love. Even if she was dead. He wasn’t without empathy, but he was still young, and the pain of other people embarrassed him.

Sometimes someone would speak in a boat. But most of the boats were silent except for the dip of the oars. They spread apart after they were out of the mouth of the harbour and each one headed for the part of the ocean where he hoped to find fish.

I see this girl, Vanden, for a while, who paints my futon frame black and who stopped seeing me because she said she saw “a spider the size of Norman Mailer” in my bathroom. I didn’t ask her who Norman Mailer was, and I didn’t ask her to come back.

The dog was born to descend this way. Millions of years ago, the stone had split to receive it. My father stared down into the hill with such focus it was as if he had done all of this, this killing, because he had to see an animal fall.