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

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

The Luckiest Man

The newspaper ran his picture three times that year. Each time the photographer caught him from the same angle. He held the cardboard check flat

The House That Needed Us

The lease says four hundred a month, furnished. October light hits the porch at a slant and flattens everything it touches. The realtor's

The Finch Effect

The chemistry exam runs seventy-eight questions, and the room reeks of dry-erase fumes and the salt-sour funk of teenagers who studied and

Primum Non Nocere

A man opened at the femoral artery has about as long as it takes his friends to carry him to a medicus. A running heart

Open Palm

The chalk smells like a kindergarten classroom, and Clay works it between his palms in slow circles, the way his father used to thumb Bactine