Joyland

Terrence Sheppard wasn’t sure why he decided to run in an isolated wooded section of Prospect Park that afternoon.  Usually he jogged one of the paved roads that divided the park into sections, or else satisfied himself with a couple laps around an open field where people tossed shiny Frisbees and chased their hyperkinetic dogs back and forth.  But he was in a more restless mood than usual—he could feel a ragged pulse in his blood—so followed a dirt path that turned increasingly narrow the deeper he ran into the woods.  Soon the blood pulse weakened, and with it, his energy.  After another minute of increasingly sluggish running, he slowed to a walk and then sat to rest on a roughly cut tree stump just off one side of the trail.  The scribbles of sky visible through the trees were gray and overcast.  An abandoned strip of yellow crime tape—Do Not Enter—hung in tatters from a nearby tree that had a couple of nails pounded into its trunk.  Beside the spiked tree was a pair of

There are only a couple more nights left of cable as Ernest, who paid for it, is no longer in his life. Angelo flips impatiently past Serengeti lions and Obama-arguing commentators to settle on a black and white courtroom scene from his grandmother’s generation, but it doesn’t make any sense as he’s ridiculously stoned.

The radiator bangs apocalyptically, his bedroom swelters, and he’s switching back to a reality show with Los Angeles teenagers when Leonora appears in the room.

Slithering slowly in through the half-closed door, she mews melancholically at the foot of the queen-sized bed. Looking at him with subtle recrimination, she pulls her enormous grey tabby frame up into the tangled sheets. Prowling across the bed to where he lies, she butts her proud face into his cheek, her snout cool and comforting against his face, unshaven since he lost his job the week before

The week Owen left New York was one of sweltering humidity reaching down to enrapture us, swaddle us, leave us all reaching for insufficient comfort. We assumed Owen was alone in the task of loading a truck, of carting boxes and disassembled furniture down flights of stairs and into a double-parked van. It was a week of sweat-stained shirts, of dodging brownouts, of foregone conclusions about the city and about what constituted comfort demolished. Owen was leaving us, and few among us were sad to see him go.

Roberta refused to move past the antiques shop, its grimy front window crowded with Korean furniture, ornaments and bric-a-brac. Anna protested her immovable mother; they were on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Seoul and en-route to Chanddokkung Palace, why delay in a creepy antiques shop? Roberta pulled Anna past the colossal stone creatures on either side of the shop entrance. Anna couldn’t decide if the bizarre-looking statues were supposed to be dogs or lions. She and her mother separated immediately, Anna drawn to the rustic urns and Roberta elsewhere.

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.  My son Zack was a junior counselor, not even sixteen till August.  The camp hired him at such a young age only because he had completed lifeguard training.  Learn to swim, we’d told him.  Learn to ride a bike!  Deliver things!  The wave pool is hiring.  We told him so many things.  Put your pennies in a piggy bank.  Save for a car!  All the little children, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight!  Leather craft, BB guns, nature walks in the arroyo, what could be so hard about that?