I am an acquired taste. Don't like me? Acquire some taste.

Cold Call

The dead man arrives with half a face. The right side stayed at the grain bin off State Road 12, where the auger took Harlan

Specimens

The first time Olivia noticed the boy next door, he was performing surgery on the dead. Ten seventeen on a Wednesday. Sodium-vapor streetlamps, the

The Marcher

The man marching on Glÿkon's left has stopped sweating. A body in this desert sweats until the water runs out. Then the skin

Dry Fire

You get paid to be the worst morning of a stranger's life. The rate runs three hundred fifty a performance, cash, invoiced as

Angel, the Rabbit

The girl walks her rabbit through Willowbrook Park at 3:42 in the afternoon, during school hours, and no one stops her. The leash is

Now Serving

The ticket says forty-four. The counter on the wall says nineteen. Glen folds the ticket once, then again, pressing the crease with his thumbnail

Love You to Death

The last Red Bull has gone warm in the cupholder. The carbonation died around sundown, and what's left tastes like a cough drop

And Then, We Woke Up

Ninety Minutes

The alert arrives as a chime, then as a color. Down the console bank, screen after screen trades its operating green for advisory yellow, and

The Lamp at the End of the Dock

He kept one green light burning at the end of the dock, and no one paid him to do it. The dock ran out over