Meeting at Night

There are several surprisingly young men with metal detectors, a little Middle Eastern girl trying desperately to fly a $3 kite, and a cruise ship just off shore. But I'm the only one here wearing blue jeans. I sit high on a dune where the sand feels packed firm under my towel and butt. Two thick bikini girls coerce their guy to snap endless photos after they dry off. Arms and legs wrapped tight around one another as they each balance on one foot in the sand. Holding towels in the air to flap above their heads with wind and squatting like ducks. When they convince the guy to do the same, I stop watching. The little girl's kite falls fast and pierces the beach head first. Only a second later, she trots in circles around the fold-up chairs in which her family sits. Kicking up sand, but not too high. None of her family notices her, or seems to care much. The kite can't move by itself, so it stays put, half-buried. And I think an old Asian couple just covertly took my p...

She's got a new hairstyle, slightly. She's lost a few pounds, maybe even ten, but you swear that same electricity arcs across the scuffed diner table. It's been over a year. You lied to her, a real doozy, worst one you'll ever tell, the type of regret that hovers over deathbeds. She might forgive you, if time were boundless as the sea on the darkest nights. But you'll never forgive yourself. One day you'll be driving that old two-lane highway out of town, and moments after you pass the Flagler County line your face will spill. You'll scream, “Why'd you do that to a girl like her? Why'd you do that to her?” Spittle will dot your steering wheel. When a car comes by in the other lane, you'll slide your sunglasses on. Yet she asked you to lunch with her, before she rear-views this town. She orders two eggs sunny side up and corned beef hash. You order two scrambled eggs: they look more like dried ocean-bottom barnacles than any eggs you've ev...

The shade of his skin is Tourist Milk. Loud-colored trunks and a surfer shirt he’s recently purchased from Gator Gifts do little to help: everyone on the beach knows he doesn't belong. Making matters worse are lace-up sneakers and crew socks—sandals he forgot, in Wisconsin and at the gift shop. His is the type of body to slump forward even when standing straight, the trademark of a man who's spent a lifetime staring at his shoes. Sometimes, he goes long stretches of a day without eating so he can pretend stomach groans are her talking to him if he can't sleep. He wasn’t there, wasn’t even aware she existed. Yet he imagines campfire flames flicking so low, the white coals barely burning at all, not even an audible crackling. So she made a drunken leap, not for a friend’s dare, but because she was there with a campfire and flight in her gut. She didn’t clear it, fell down, the skin of her hip sizzling until she finally rolled. The soft scar that stretched nearly halfway...

At three years old, Cheyenne loved McKlusky Beach Park, which was really just a place to park your car and walk down to the beach. Mornings, before we left for preschool, she'd beg to go there in the afternoon. More often than not I relented. On those days, before picking her up, I'd shove the swimsuits and folding chair and beach toys into the trunk. A purple plastic bucket and a matching plastic spade, but it never took long before she just rolled around in some sand, tossing clumps in the air or at birds. Those were the best days to be a mother, because the sun and salt air and breeze weren't just for her, as so many things a mother does are. One day something unfortunate happened. I sat where I always did, book in hand and leaned back in my beach chair—not far away, but not so close she constantly felt my eyes. Some collection by Welty, a story about a slow girl filling up her hope chest to marry a man she’d only met the night before. She asked a few old ladies to g...

Albert grunted as he pulled his head out of the fridge. “Huh, say again?” he shouted toward the living room. Sometimes he wished those faint voices in his head were the first signs of dementia, but always he reluctantly remembered they were only his wife. He reached into his ear, turned up the hearing aid. “The paper says Pat Sajak had a stroke,” she said. “Ah, Louise, so long as it wasn't Vanna who even gives a shit?” he said. Then searched the fridge a third time for leftover tuna salad they’d polished off during lunch, just hours earlier.

A cake-faced woman named Jeanette with a chain smoker’s snarl didn’t actually walk Allan over to the folder containing prayer card samples, but just waved in the general direction, muttering “thatta way.” Allan did not, by any stretch, consider himself a writer, or even much of a reader. He had briefly minored in English during college, until Dr. Liebowitz taught one Hemingway story for an entire semester, each week from a different theoretical perspective. After feminizing, deconstructing, psychoanalyzing, structuralizing, post-structuralizing, ecocriticizing, reconstructing, queering, and killing Hemingway, Allan opted for a minor with real theories. Quantum physics. Despite his change of minor and heart, Allan still graduated college caring about grammar. If quantum physics taught him one thing it’s that the little stuff matters. Such as where the period is placed on a prayer card. You’ll arrive at the gates and hear angels call to you, “Welcome home” . This wasn’t the f...

You snort #3 off a glass picture frame and stare at the final 2, beneath which you see good old Zanbo. You loved that damn dog. You wonder about doggy heaven. Do they have his favorite treats, and who scratches that mole behind his left ear? He always brought the Frisbee back, no matter how far you flung it. Thing could catch a thermal wind and glide clear into the next county, but you bet bottom dollar Zanbo'd bring it back, next day if need be. Your new dog, fucking mutt trots over to the Frisbee and just stands there. Sniffs it. Wanders off to piss or shit. No Zanbo at all. Sometimes you want to pick up that new mutt and chuck it over the fence, out into the woods, aim for that big pine with the woodpecker; maybe the mutt'll crack its empty skull and die on the spot, give them skinny night deer something to gnaw on. You can barely hear it trying to bark from the cage. Yeah, that's right. Trying. You found yourself some black duct tape to match that snout fur and clamped ...

You may be wondering why Nathaniel is presently tweezing legs and antennae off a freshly dead cockroach discovered twitching near the dryer. You wouldn't be wondering at all if you knew Nathaniel's younger sister: Geraldine. Countless trips to the community pool when (at his mother’s behest) he's been ashamed to carry Geraldine's pink floaties and shirtless man dolls while she struts in front of him, hands free and baby-fat arms swaying. Nathaniel won't know the definition of emasculation until fifteen, but understands the feeling all too well at seven. He scoops up legs and antennae before flicking the limbless carcass under the dryer. And how can he forgive those nine days after his mom listened to an old record and Geraldine forced him to call her “Geralda” because it almost rhymed with Esmeralda? Back in his room and sitting at his desk, Nathaniel carefully spreads out the verminous haul before reaching into a Buzz Lightyear pencil cup for his favorite p...

“He's a smoke machine. Puts out the appropriate amount of gray to make things sexy and mysterious, but at the end of the day no one buys a smoke machine—you rent.” In this moment, Shirley could tell me that Jaxton Cliffstone is a serial rapist wanted in thirteen states or that he has two giant hairy moles just above his junk or that he’d never do anything more than just hit-and-quit a girl like me. Seventeen thousand venomous words would wither in defeat at his glow. I’d suck him off right here if he asked. Even better, if he demanded. Down on my knees—no pillow—right next to the table with the punch bowl, chocolate crème cake, and the homemade pumpkin-bran cookies no one is eating, except Harriet. (Guess who made the cookies?) Another farewell party, number three this quarter. Just lemme get my mitts on Jaxton and I’ll give Fenwick Haberknackle a show more memorable than the boss’s monotonous speech or the gold-plated retirement watch tucked inside that goody bag. Hell, I’ll...

“This is how you set a table for breakfast. Pay attention.” Mother. I’m leaving town for good with Alan in three hours and now she decides to teach me things I apparently couldn’t have learned twelve years ago when I threw tea-less backyard tea parties for the neighborhood girls, or two years ago when I still took classes and gave a fuck about learning, or three months ago when she found out I loved Alan enough to follow him across the country without a ring on my finger. “Smooth the tablecloth, all the edges. No man likes a lumpy table for breakfast. Bad luck to start his day.” Her hands. So dry and worn I wonder why blood even bothers pumping its way through that fat vein on top. How does blood feel after traveling so far only to find desolation? I guess blood turns back and forgets so quickly that it just makes the return trip again and again.  “Always best to have some juice, set it in the center of the table in a glass pitcher, that way he’s never confused wh...

She wasn’t there, but her heart was on Little Mort’s miniature steel table, which stood beside the full-sized steel table of Big Mort. No bloody mess; just another dried up heart, severed at the valves, the heads of a dozen multicolored push-pins poking out. Little Mort’s third heart. When handing his son a heart, Big Mort would tell where it had come from. For the first heart, he said, “This is a politician’s heart. Notice its blackness.” And the second heart: “This came from a lawyer. Feel how cold it is.” For that third heart, Big Mort looked squarely at his son. “The heart of a prostitute. It’s empty.” But Little Mort didn’t know the word “prostitute” from any school books or spelling tests or TV shows he watched with his dad in the den before bedtime. He had to Google it. Noun – a woman who engages in sexual activity for payment . However, this did not sate his curiosity: it rather prompted more. So he clicked on the “images” tab. And scrolled down and scrolled still furt...

Jerry Kragthorpe never ate a donut in his life; he always had at least two, often three, on special mornings four. So, Alexandria Jenkins—morning shift at Happy DoughNutty Coffee—was understandably stunned by his order one brisk Tuesday. “A small coffee, no cream, milk, or sugar, just black, to go.” Alexandria turned slightly away, shared a blank stare with Mary, whom she had already signaled to start making Jerry's usual triple caramel latte the second he stood in line. Mary poured the cup down the drain, shaking her head, eyes aghast.  Alexandria turned back to find Jerry practically gawking at the glass display case. What’s wrong today?, Alexandria thought: his favorite double German chocolate crullers are right there. “One small black coffee. Is that it?” A startled Jerry snapped his mouth shut.  “Uh, yep. That's it.”  Jerry tongued a dollop of cold sweat from his upper lip, and Alexandria could plainly hear him tapping the toes of both feet....