He sold the Ludington townhouse at a loss, bought the cabin east of Manistee for a steal. Bankruptcy. Someone’s loss, his gain. He was a wheeler-dealer. Also a ladies’ man. When women discovered he was single, they pouted their lips, batted their eyes . . .
I live in a place where the Erie Canal sliced like a razor blade through the middle of our town. From that time on we were the extra bits of fat that are cut away to let the meat breathe . . .
The doing didn’t take long to get done. It was a hot night at the end of October, just at the time in Brisbane when the jacaranda have almost all fallen to the ground and the frangipani are blossoming on the trees. Frankie and Johnnie were spread around the deck of the small house that she rented in Annerley. 10 pm on Friday night and they hadn’t made it out . . .
By eleven in the morning the streets of Devine, Texas were as flat and as hot as the griddle the cook downstairs was doing bacon and eggs on . . .
A knock on the door interrupted Imam Galim’s late night tea. Resting in his apartment attached to the Qolşärif mosque—the largest mosque not only in Tatarstan’s capital, but all of Russia—he was watching the moon rise over the Kazanka River and the nearby Blagoveshchensk Cathedral . . .
Deirdre stares around her at shelf after shelf of cell phones, earpieces, cell phone covers, holsters, and some strange metallic screen things she cannot explain. She rarely comes into town anymore and it took her twenty minutes to find the mall and fifteen more to find a parking space. She is still wearing her apron and only now notices it. She tears it off and unsuccessfully tries to cram it into her coat pocket on top of her car keys. She stuffs it under the display of luminous cell phone cases . . .
On the few days out of the year when the range was closed he’d get out the duct tape and stick the PVC-and-wadding suppressor on his Ruger .22 pistol. He’d load it with subsonics. He’d open the window, take out the screen, and throw some empty beer cans out in the yard. Then he’d stand back in the dark of his room and make them dance . . .
We had switched from beer to a pair of hot rums dubbing around in a reporters’ bar across from the women’s prison downtown. Outside it was storming in late-October style, the first chilly rain that gnaws like winter, and from our polished stools we watched the people tilt their umbrellas at one another like blind knights as they passed . . .