The statue’s resting place looked pretty good. All she really had to do was get him deep enough so the dogs didn’t dig him up before the sale. After her exertions over his tomb, the hollow Saint Joseph seemed to weigh nothing in her hand. He seemed to float in space before her eyes. She set him down on his back in the hole, but found that she couldn’t shovel the dirt on top of him, not right on his face like that. She turned him face-down, but that seemed worse. When she picked him up again, half-frozen dirt had sifted into his open base. You could see it through the translucent, cream-colored skin: Saint Joseph turning brown as he filled up with soil.

Jennifer was a performance artist. The blood was a prop in her act. There were many props in Jennifer’s act, but blood was the unifying device. She concealed plastic sacs of the homemade blood in various articles she had with her onstage—a child’s fluffy teddy bear, her pearl-encrusted evening bag, the bodice of her white bridal gown. For an hour she paraded about to her own synthesizer music, acting out dysfunctional family relationships and decrying bankrupt, oppressive governments, while the Barbie-doll world hemorrhaged around her. 

More than anything, he would like to turn the nighttime sky into 3-D color TV. That would be the most incredible hack of all, he says, and he claims to know how to do it, but it would cost a lot of money, even for a few seconds, and so far the funding has been elusive. He pitched the idea to his old friend Vernon DeCloud—financing celestial television by selling some sky-time for advertising—and though Vern would be perfectly happy to go down in history as the man who turned the stratosphere into a Coke commercial, he said no. Vern didn’t believe Tempesto could do it.

…nothing changed with Nadia. She didn’t get better, she didn’t get worse, her fever never went below a hundred and one. I visited her before and after work all week. Her IV bag emptied and was replaced; the back of her hand around the needle was bruised dark as an Oreo. She would wake up occasionally and say hello, her voice hoarse, her palate swollen and red when I peered in, and I would say hello back, touch her face. Ted came after school and read aloud from his book, sitting with his legs crossed, his big dark head bent over the pages. Every day he bought a single orange soda in a paper cup for sixty-five cents. Nurses came in red fur hats, sang “Jingle Bells” and “O Christmas Tress.” The rash traveled down her neck and back, across her stomach, drifting, and I imagined something about the size of my palm moving under her skin, some unformed thing lost, looking for a place to fasten itself.

Joseph couldn’t get anyone to buy his dead father’s house, and he knew why: it was old and full of his dead father’s things, and the roof leaked when it rained. But Joseph couldn’t clean out the closets or mow the lawn or really do anything normal because his wife May had filed for divorce and it was just about killing him. It also took up most of his spare time, so for two months Joseph spent his days teaching and most of his evenings with his lawyer, Alan Pinkerman, in his lawyer’s green-carpeted office in the mall, Joseph’s weakening heart stretched on a rack while Alan Pinkerman sharpened pencils and sucked coffee back and forth through his terrible teeth.

In the sack of mail were three newspapers still wrapped in their rubber bands, a phone bill, and five brochures from exterminators. “Goddamn that nuthead,” my mother said, fanning through them. “He’s worried about bugs now.” She dropped his mail on the hall table and started to leave. “Wait a minute,” she said, and disappeared. She came back with a silver serving spoon, long and ornate, which she slipped into her purse. “I deserve something out of this.”

By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.

At the end of the first week of teaching, Lynnea found herself having to raise her voice to get their attention—something she wasn’t used to doing. They didn’t quite yell and scream, but their collective whimsical talk was the unsettling buzz of a far-off carnival. When she sent them to the principal’s office, they snickered and bugged out cartoon eyes, heading toward the office for a few paces, then bolting in the opposite direction. She found herself sharking the room, telling duos here and there that they should not be talking about their neon fingernail polish or the Mos Def lyrics in front of them, but the novel at hand, Their Eyes Were Watching God. They were quiet for a moment, controlling their grins as if they were hiding something live and wriggling between the covers of their notebooks.

You could only truly speak in tongues when all worldly matters were emptied from your mind, or else there was no room for God. To do that, you had to be thinking about him, praising him, or singing to him. She had tried at church and she had tried at home, but nothing worked. In her room, she would genuflect, pushing her head against her bed ruffle, reciting scriptures, praying, singing, concluding it all with a deep, waiting silence. But nothing would come out. Her only solace was that Marcelle was three years older and hadn’t spoken in tongues either.

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.

The chief legal problem connected with hidden food is that of title. A scavenger cannot acquire title to chicken that he has discovered abruptly, and therefore he cannot transfer title even by barter to an innocent dining man who has requested a stew. Hence the rightful owner of the chicken may take it without compensation from anyone who has not properly tracked it according to the rules set forth in the Topographical Legend and Location of Food Nooks. The innocent dining man, however, may challenge the scavenger for breach of his implied warranty of good title as it applies to edible objects, in this case the promised delivery of a chicken bisque with definite ownership.

When air kills itself in remote regions, the debris settles here on the grass, sharpening the points. Men of the house may not walk on these areas, nor may they ever observe the grass without pain in the chest and belly. They exist as figures which are doubled over, in static repose against the house territory. When children sleep on these points of lawn, the funeral of air passes just above their heads in a crosswind with the body. Funerals generally are staged in pollinated wind frames, so that the air can shoot to the east off of the children’s breath, dying elsewhere along the way, allowing fresh, living air to swoop in on the blast-back to attack the house.

It was 1943. The agency that helped smuggle Jews into Switzerland had sent them, this third trip, to collect money from the rich and—for the time being—protected Jews in the Italian Zone. Tomorrow they would be returning with enough money for six families to escape to Geneva. Maxim wondered what this farm girl would make of such information. He wondered when his name, and his mother’s and brother’s, would reach the top of the list. He wondered if she would do more than kiss him if he tried. He looked at her, her full lips and pretty face. She turned onto her side and pulled her jacket closer.

“You broke into my car?’

She was off the hood in an instant, the car between them, hands up as if he were about to rush her. “We didn’t,” she said.

He looked at her a moment, then at the younger girl, still sitting in the car. She hadn’t moved. An odd, sweet smell came off her, as if she’d been eating candy all day. “It was open, sir,” this girl said, looking up. “We just sat in it to wait.”

“You left the keys,” the other girl said, keeping her distance. She reached in her jeans and came out with his keys. She tossed them at him. “Someone could have stolen it. We watched it for you.”

At the stove three old men tend a cooking pot. They hover, hold ladles, wooden spoons, a spatula. Birnbaum steps closer and sees, in the pot, tea bags, all he had, maybe three dozen, flailing in the brown swirl like drowning men coming up for air. The old men sniff, carry spoonfuls to their noses, poke each other’s bony ribs, and smile. They are in holiday clothing, unbelievably tattered, fur hats that look gnawed on, long coats with peeling colored patches, fringes the color of cat’s teeth trailing to the floor.

Each pub has a barrel-rolling team. That makes ten teams. You wear fireproof gloves. The barrel is full of flaming tar. You have to see how long you can keep the barrel up in the air. It works like a relay. Four people on the team. You pass it to the next bloke when you get too hot and the barrel gets too heavy. You hold it high up above you and in your hands you rotate it; the flames shoot out into the crowd as you run down the streets. The people compact into themselves. You shout and the people duck down and run back and climb over each other and the flames shoot out at them and you laugh at the manic growls of fear and panic. There haven’t been more than a few deaths.

Warren brought Toast to the party with him. Toast is a chicken. One evening two years ago Warren phoned his cousin and said Hey, man, I’m horny, bring some chicks over. His cousin lives on a farm. He gathered up twelve chicks from the barn and threw them in the back of his pickup truck and drove them to Warren’s apartment.

Warren said, Dude, that’s so totally not what I meant.

The dog ate eleven of them. The survivor ran around the house and slid around on the kitchen floor and squeaked when it was hungry. That chicken’s gonna be toast pretty damn soon, someone said. That’s why they call him Toast.

at the suspension center the counselor said keep a journal.

i said piss on that.

she said watch your mouth & i said watch your own or ill smack you upside of it.

i mean I always wanted to have a journal but i couldnt tell her that. i said fuck off i aint keepin a journal, she said its a requirement, i said pissonit.

so im doing it anyways i just aint lettin on to that old diesel-dyke bitch about it.

why its lowercase is coz that’s what trent says you do if you write stuff down, if your good you do it lowercase. like he says if you write poems thats what they all do all the poets do he said.