In the summer of 2006, when my hometown’s beloved Choi’s Videos went out of business, Mr. and Mrs. Choi decided to sell their inventory as a last-ditch effort before retiring and moving across the street from their eldest son in North Carolina
I didn’t notice when the bird first found me. Even though my parents and brother and I moved a lot, every moving truck to every house we ever lived in across New England to the Midwest brought the same spotted-wood birdhouse, stone birdbath, hanging feeders.
It’s been four years since my friend’s disappearance. Some would say it’s been four years since his death. Neither of these statements is exactly true.
Julia, at twelve, thirteen years old, bore the reputation with teachers and parents of friends, parents of her brother and sister’s friends, as being responsible. A sturdy girl. No gossip.
It’s eleven o’clock at night in Rome, which means it’s ten o’clock back home in London. I open my hotel room window and look across the rooftops, towards the station.
Nina did not want to pose with the tiger, but as the animal was the circus’s greatest attraction and people had come for miles around to see it, she felt she could not refuse when her turn came.
It all went down just before the Fourth of July the year I turned ten. All week long my siblings and I had been too scared to ask Mamá and Papá whether we would have as many fireworks as we did the year before.
Tía Consuelo, with her big mouth and big earrings and eighties perm, sits me down at the kitchen table and says, “I don’t want you to work for that puto.” By puto, she means Johnny González, owner of Speedy G Car Wash on San Mateo.
Me llamo Walter Gomez, I'm a Policia National Bolivariano. I'm the guy you see holding the shield while those come mierdas of the opposition pretend to demonstrate but throw rocks, Molotov cocktails at us.
The foreman had gone into town to spend the night with a stewardess, leaving Roy and Tommy alone at the mountain fire station with a radio and a water tanker they weren’t supposed to drive.
No one outside Nashville had ever heard of Billy Dice’s All-Stars until last night, when our drummer, Marty Marshall, fell through the plate glass window down at Clyde’s Country Corner.