Eddie Mara hit the Portland city limit and raced the motorbike he dreaded up Congress Street. He'd sworn to Stacy he wouldn't be late for the Starbuck's meeting with her folks to plan their wedding.

"You know how Dad is about tardiness," she'd warned last night in that low, thrilling voice he wanted in his ears forever. Then she'd dropped it even deeper, in mocking imitation. "It's the first refuge of the disrespectful and the disorganized."

Eddie had laughed at the mimicry, but took the warning to heart. Last thing he needed was J. Thompson Fillmore, Esquire thinking him flaky or uncouth—not now he'd finally said yes to the marriage. Bad enough to show up on this beat-to-hell bike in a scuffed-up leather jacket. Not exactly the model of sober rectitude, and certainly no way to convince the head of Maine's best law firm to hire him right out of law school. But he'd had no choice.

He checked the Timex strapped over the jacket's cuff. 3:52. He could still make it—if only he could remember Stacy's shortcut.

There! Frost Street! He'd seen it almost too late.

Throwing a glance over his shoulder, he forced himself to twist the throttle and lean hard-left to cut across two lanes. Gravity sped him downhill. His tired hands and arms ached as he bounced over train tracks. He gunned the Honda Rebel's small 234 cc engine back up the hill, only to round a curve and skid to a halt behind traffic waiting for the light at Stevens Avenue.

"Come on," he urged behind the dark face shield of the dinged-up Bell helmet he'd bought with the bike.   Continue…

It was a chilly night, especially for Florida. In the Crown Convenience Store, an oasis of fluorescence in the back-road darkness of Fort Myers, Brenna, her almost-white blond hair falling loose from her ponytail and casting a fine veil over her saddle-brown eyes, sat behind the counter, bent forward on a stool, focusing not on her words but on just getting the assignment done, her history book open, her research notes from the classes Mr. Morton held in the library scattered in front of her.

Above her the store lights hummed. Occasionally a car would crunch by on the crumbling, barely lit road. Those sounds and the whirring of the coolers and her pen scratching against paper were her usual nighttime soundtrack. She worked at the Crown five—sometimes six—nights a week. They needed money. And it worked out because it was a pretty easy job, a quiet one, a lot more quiet than home, so she could use the time to get all her homework done.

She always did what was asked of her—her homework, her chores. She never wondered about the "why" behind the assignments, though. Each task she did for completeness, not for understanding. Her mother had taught her that the doing and the not-doing was what mattered—do the dishes, do the laundry, don't hum, don't ask questions.

She hurried through three paragraphs on her essay about James Polk, appreciating how quiet the night was. Some nights, if her two usuals—Mrs. Gates for her cigarettes and Old Joe for his cup of coffee—didn't make an appearance, she was never disturbed. She thought it was going to be one of those nights. With the temperature barely clinging to fifty, her elderly regulars had decided to forgo their nighttime stroll, she was sure. Almost two hours into her shift and not a single customer.

But then the electronic chime above the door chirped. Brushing her loose hair behind her ears, Brenna stood and put her pen down. A couple, dressed in nice clothes—dress shoes, dress slacks—a charcoal pea coat on him and a coral, belted parka on her—stepped inside and went directly to the coolers in the back. Out-of-towners. No one wore heavy coats around here. Once in a while people like that would drop in. A lost couple. Maybe visiting aging relatives or a dying parent. There was a lot of aging and dying happening in Florida.  Continue…

My friend Earl Carlyle was talking. Earl's a minister over at that Grace Church next to the parking lot; this gave him the right to talk sometimes. The three of us were sitting at the kitchen table. A bottle of Chardonnay kept going around. There was Earl and me and Cecil Fisher. We were neighbors. Earl's wife, Sheila, left him a couple of weeks ago. Cecil's wife had been put away—an institution. My wife was at a buyer's convention in Vegas. So there were just the three of us on a Saturday night. No women. Cecil Fisher taught literature at the women's college across the river. Because of that, all he could talk about was women. Women this, women that. He thought most women were very spiritual.

Earl said, "You think my Sheila is spiritual? Running off with that French professor?"

"Maybe not your wife," Cecil said. "Sheila might not be all that spiritual."

"What do any of us really know about women?" I said. "Sure, some are spiritual. But others can be pretty carnal."

"Also sentimental," Cecil said. "I hate that."

"Then there's your bitches and your prick teasers," Earl said.

"All the way from Martha Stewart to Mother Teresa," I said. "Just kidding."

Earl said, "Cecil, how can you be so romantic about women after Vicki put all that windshield wiper solvent in your Chardonnay?"

"My wife might be another exception," Cecil said.  Continue…

Stress, anxiety, depression, Bob Coleman had it all. It had become so bad he sought the aid of a physician. His doctor prescribed a new, cutting edge pill recently allowed on the market, Zolexabaltazac. Along with reducing stress, anxiety, and depression, it boosted mental clarity and increased cognitive function. Bob took a twenty milligram pill before bedtime and fell fast asleep.

The following morning he was awakened by a loud, ear-cringing noise. It sounded as though a hard, blunt object were being dragged slowly across the pinewood floor. Bob's eyes shot open. They must have been sleep-worn because he couldn't believe what he saw—his wife straining to traverse the room with an enormous cross strapped to her back. She wore nothing but a soiled, knee-length Roman tunic and sandals. Wrapped around her forehead was a crown of sharp thorns. Dried blood ran down to her eyebrows.

"Carol?" Bob uttered in stunned amazement.

Bob's wife stopped dragging her cross and turned to him. Since her arms were tied to both ends of the cross, she had to turn with her entire body to face him.

"What?" She replied, peeved by the halting of her progress.

"Why are you dressed like that?" he asked, trying his best to remain calm.

Bob's wife took a moment to view her tunic and sandals. She didn't notice anything unusual.

"What's wrong with what I'm wearing?"

Bob's restraint finally broke. "You're in a tunic with a huge cross on your back!"

Carol stared at her husband, stone-faced. "Are you done? Is joke time over? Cause I've got a lot to do today. Not that you or the kids ever notice."   Continue…

He'd insisted that his ashes be sprinkled like sawdust on the floor of the saloon, where I often found him.

Snow from a storm several days earlier remained on the ground. His footprints trailed from the stoop out to the street. I entered by the back door. Our front door was opened only for preachers and bill collectors.

Inside I ignited the stove's gas jets to temper the bone-chilling cold.

On the kitchen table lay his yellow pad and pencil. Each morning he'd add up his bills, listing those that were most urgent at the top. The scribbled date read January 27.

Dated photographs of each of us still adorned the living room walls. Pantomiming a furniture display window from the forties, the overstuffed umber sofa and matching chair shared a bronze standing lamp with its illuminated marble base. She might have received the new preacher from our church there, or a member of the congregation, each visiting in a vain effort to convince her to return to worship. He would have sat mute in the kitchen or fled to the cellar.

The dining room had become the actual living room once they purchased their first television. With the room's single window's opaque green blind drawn, a lounge chair now sat opposite. A neighbor said he'd found him sitting before the set that remained on.   Continue…

The envelope arrived in a jumble of bills and junk mail. It was small and thin, and I almost tossed it in the trash with the Acme circular, but the creamy paper caught my eye before I could. I didn't recognize the handwriting, yet it was oddly, eerily, familiar, like a taste or smell I'd experienced but couldn't identify. There was no return address. I opened it to find a three-by-three black and white photo folded inside a scrap of paper, scribbled with a note in that same handwriting: 'A picture of your quite glamorous Mom and her almost-husband Lafitte. The story I told you is yours forever. XOX Donna.'

Donna. Donna Grant, my mother's first cousin. Of course. The handwriting was familiar because it resembled my mother's own script, as well as that of my grandfather and my great aunt Rose, all long dead. Writing a note on a scrap of paper was just like them. The Cannons all had a sort of haphazard way to them. Chances are that Donna had come across this picture accidentally and had tossed it into that envelope, not that she'd been looking for it, planning to send it to me. It was the kind of thing my mother, too, might have done.

I picked up the photo and peered, trying to make sense of it. The young woman in the photo could not have been more than twenty-five. She did look like my mother, but she easily could have been someone else. She could even have been Donna when she was young. I could see my mother in the face, but nothing in the expression or posture was anything like the mother I had known.   Continue…

summery as the days have been / it's only when you drive up the steep mountain road and feel /
at the same outcropping of granite as every year / cooler air infiltrating the car's closed interior /
and you pull up to the generations-old family lake cabin / and open the car door and step out into
the same earthy dampness you remember from since forever / remember along with the familiar
slap of water against the wooden dock / and smell of gasoline for the dinghy motor wafting from
the dented metal shed / and you find / though it's only late afternoon / that you and your wife and
kids all need sweatshirts so you dig them out of bags / and you turn the rusty lock and   Continue…

Dominique drives her Volvo to the car wash
the way a Texas redneck strolls into
a honky-tonk—looking to feel sexy,
maybe get some action, random violence,
and a wild, sky-high adrenaline thrill.   Continue…

The coupled form's the norm
in our zoology—
the yin cleaves to the yang,
the male melds with the female
until their coupling shapes
each partial creature whole.   Continue…

Always on the highest perch,
their tunes an airy ornament
to the trees, mockingbirds
often bounce into the sky
as if to jerk their way free
from a tether holding them
connected to the earth.   Continue…

It comes on
dark, relentless,
blowing eighty miles an hour,
snaps a sycamore,
smashes it against a car,
as lightning flashes, thunder roars,
and wet debris
blasts in all directions.   Continue…

You wash the final dishes clean, watching
bits of food swirl briskly, disappear.
You quit the sink and walk into the sunroom,
look through the window, see the long-dead grass,
the birdbath overturned again by wind,
the barren trees, the desiccated earth.   Continue…

There is nothing refined about paradise.
I'd been there more than once.
Paradise must be vulgar
Like your first orgasm
however memorable it may have been.   Continue…

is the softness of your salt and pepper curls
between my fingers,
coarse hair like a small brush
on the small of your back,
tobacco on your breath
that eventually killed you.   Continue…