There was no hope of a call from her husband now—not in the middle of the night—and she sure as hell wouldn’t call him on her birthday. She continued trolling Facebook.

My big sister’s always had a certain power over me.

She was entering a war zone; and, of all her battles today, this one was her own.

Her collarbones jut outward, her shoulders, her elbows. She is all erection.

I was certain I was on my way to greatness or at least to a unique place in the history of modern players.

Vaguely, he felt that “times” were good or bad or somewhere in between, but his own life had no such flows and eddies.

Studies show: memory is OJ from a can. Reconstituted from concentrate, to be exact.

It was as if we had been looking at our living room through bleach-colored glasses that hid the scuff marks on the walls, bumps from moving furniture around, a space behind the couch where I had etched my initials with the grime from my boots on a day I had been binge watching American Top 40 upside-down.

The magazines kept coming every week or every month, so it was one or another of them every day, and you didn’t have what we both knew it was going to take to make them stop.

The voices were faint, indistinct, like a quiet murmur that played inside her head. Once, when Marilyn told her father what she heard, he told her not to worry. The ancestors were watching over her, he said. She was the fortunate one.