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The Cooking Lesson

A good fire, in fact, is like a perfect lie. It takes myriad shapes, it mesmerizes, it consumes itself and leaves nothing behind. Somehow, in my mind, the perfect fire and the perfect lie had always been intertwined.

Warja’s Feast

I was struggling to open a can of powdered milk with a pocketknife when Kombate clapped his hands outside the window of my house and called, “Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!”

The Road Out Of Acorn Lake

You can’t find Mr. Right. You won’t meet a guy with enough criminal swagger in him to make your skin dance, and enough farmer in him to let you sleep through the night. You have to pick one and learn to ignore your ache for the other.

The Living End

What I remember most about Sarah Collins is her face pressed up against the back window of the El Camino as the car sped down our street. A big hand was reaching over her forehead, trying to pry her from the glass. On the middle finger was a silver ring that caught a ray of sunlight. I squinted from the glare, and the car was gone.

The Vomitorium

We were standing at the edge of the blacktop at Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Grade School, as far away from the recess monitor as we could get. It was 1978, and we were in eighth grade — though Ralph would have been in high school already if he hadn’t failed both the third and the fifth grades.

Random Acts Of Life

The tests came back negative: Colete Lopez will be all right. She does not have AIDS, hepatitis, or cholera. According to the New York Times, the six-year-old, who attends first grade at PS 150, was stabbed in the leg with a hypodermic by a fifty-one-year-old man with no known address.

Tree-Jumper

He told me about his own first “transgression”: fondling a seven-year-old girl; how one thing led to another (he was mostly vague about his crimes) until he finally got caught. How his greatest fear was that he would someday molest his own children, though he didn’t have any yet. The other inmates at Coxsackie had pinned a label on him: “tree-jumper,” a guy who stalks children and hides in bushes or behind trees.

A Coward And A Thief

On the counter top there’s a pad of paper with some familiar but illegible scrawl. The handwriting is angry. Next to the pad is a five-dollar bill under a refrigerator magnet. Too obvious. More clunking sounds from the basement. I wonder if he’s down there.

Fist Stick Knife Gun

If you wonder how a fourteen-year-old can shoot another child in the head, or how boys can commit a drive-by shooting and then go home to dinner, you need to realize that one doesn’t get to that point in a day, or a week, or a month.

Me And Miss Messiah