I’ve taken to a big steer named Cowboy who lives over the hill from my mother-in-law’s at the Second Hand Ranch, where they take in animals who would otherwise be turned into coats or eaten. But flies gather around his… Read More ›
Memoir
Richard Brautigan is dead at 49
It took about a month for them to find his body and a whole lot longer than that for him to be discovered while he was alive. And he is there at the roadside jotting down notes by a flattened… Read More ›
Say goodbye to the Hoh
The sea spills its guts out to anyone who will listen, just hurls itself up and forgets it’s told the same story before: two black heads in the water floating that could be humans staring at us but they are seals,… Read More ›
What gets caught in the drain traps
It was really time we cleaned the drain out in the bathtub with it slowing down every day, the hope it would just sort itself out and we wouldn’t have to deal with it, the not-altogether-clean water pooling down there,… Read More ›
Sure
My grandfather has fallen asleep with a paperback in his lap, hands braided, glasses on — and I watch his reflection from the bathroom mirror where someone has left a stick of deodorant by the sink that says Sure, and I am… Read More ›
Postcard from Division Street, 92
We had all just graduated college — at least I had, Dave had a couple more credits to go but said screw it, he’d get it another time — and Chris was pretty much self-educated on heady books and foreign… Read More ›
A thumbnail of a person
The playground is empty though it’s the middle of the day, the middle of the summer, with laminated signs on stakes warning the slides are very hot from the sun. It’s like the heat made everyone disappear, until two teenaged… Read More ›
You’ve got to earn the right to be wrong
The woman in the pizza shop carries her kid on her hip like it’s some growth, a Mini-Me, an evil puppet you can’t control that just talks like that and won’t stop. Because I’m not employed and my wife is over-worked and we’re… Read More ›
Soft shoulders
I’d had them for a long time, but hadn’t worn them in a long time, the Vietnamese fishermen pants I used for Yoga in the studio at my gym at work, standing on my head with a wife beater, I… Read More ›
The Safeway in Chewelah, WA
On the drive back I make my kids listen to Townes Van Zandt since it feels like we could be in Texas it’s so hot, everything flat and beaten down by the sun. The songs about places he’d been in… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 