"Who chopped your fingers off?" Amparo asked during our reading lesson in Freetown.

I stretched out my left hand and looked at the blunt knobs where my pinky and ring finger used to be. "I left them in Iraq," I said, mumbling that I'd fought there in '90. "A grenade went off."

Amparo lowered the book she'd been reading aloud, The Call of the Wild, her black eyes looking into my blue ones with a mix of strength and tenderness. The way she phrased her question made me uneasy; usually people asked, "What happened to your hand?" minus the gruesome assumption that someone cut the two fingers off. But, then again, this was Sierra Leone, not Virginia; Amparo grew up next to a diamond field ruled by a fellow named Colonel Cut Hands.
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Every Thursday my friend Winston and I hang out for a late night coffee at the Event Horizon Cafe, a new place with spiffy brass bar railings and tables lacquered into glass. I can't tell you how much I admire lacquer. I savor the very thought of it. And there are lots of other sights in the Event Horizon. Women, I mean, though all we do is look. I'm guilty, I gaze, so kill me and get it over with. I also love my wife, and Winston is about to marry a woman he met in South Carolina. We're old guys relatively speaking, but as I always say, I've got the hormones of a teenager at puberty. I'll let Winston's hormones speak for themselves. We both have gray hair, some anyway; there's no stopping it. You can get away with plucking at thirty or thirty-five, beyond that, forget it. I hope it never comes to midnight scrapings of the skull itself.
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Her mattress was queen-sized and covered by a European feather bed, then a comforter that billowed like the sea in a French watercolor. To this exotic bedding she had added a couple bolsters and ten pillows. An expensive reading lamp stood beside the bed, the kind that can be bent to any angle. Her headboard was a long bookshelf mounted on cinderblocks, four pieces of pine stained to look like cherry wood. He learned to be careful about the corners.

Her hair was dyed jet black but not so short as to be a rejection of femininity. Both of them had pierced ears, favored black leather jackets, and had taken retail jobs intended not to lead to careers. He worked at Ace Hardware; she, at the Gap. Neither wanted what their peers did, not washer/dryers, not even tattoos. They were artists. They had recognized each other as such almost instantly.
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The boy stands on the dirt road above the culvert, motorcycle by his side. It's hot for September. Dust and bugs kick up from the cornfield; there's haze in the air. The boy wears a white T-shirt and jeans. He's skinny and young. It's quiet. Sunday morning.

Spencer Tewksbury watches from the window of his farmhouse. An hour the boy has been out there, leaning against that wall, staring up the long, flat road. It's a curious thing; he has not taken off that helmet. Is he out of gas? It's not Spencer's business. Not his business to go out there and ask. And wouldn't the boy have come to his door if he needed help? Or maybe some water? Spencer's pickup is parked in the driveway. His front door is open. His screen door bangs in the breeze.
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My mother taught me to fish the same way she learned: with a supple length of sapling wood, a bit of string, and a fishhook.

"When I was your age, we couldn't afford fishhooks," my mother explained as she showed me how to tie the fisherman's knot. "I had to use a bent safety pin. The fish kept slipping off." I tried to imagine why this made the bent safety pin more practical than investing in a fish hook or two, but I couldn't.

"Your Grandma Hinkle," my mother went on, "didn't have any fishhooks either. She carved her own out of slivers of wood."
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Cloud Bank
  low and gray
angles down across
  our eastern sky
at break of day--
  makes the lake
a darkened plane;
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Two chairs on
  an old front porch,
two chairs
  at the river's edge,
two chairs
  at roadside places
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Look at how his face is stuck to the table
in a puddle of coagulation all because he
smacked his wife around and she decided
to serve up a short stack of payback in the
form of a .45 instead of pancakes and sausage,
his favorite. Big gun for such a small
girl.

I guess we can pry his face up with the spatula.
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I was on E and had to get to a gas station before I ran out.
You should be out catching murderists and rapers.
I was trying to get away from the bee in my car.
Do you like my boobs? They're brand new.
Don't you have anything better to do?
I have to go to the bathroom!!
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She walks in mercury vapor like washed out death,
not the she of Byron,
not a pretty woman as myth would
have her. Just walk on by--
in that same maddening pattern,
like a retarded bird flying repeatedly into
the same pane of glass with a monotonous
determination. For the love of God, open the damn window.
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I went to be among nature.
convinced it was this great jigsaw
with a billion times a billion
interlocking pieces.
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