This is another story with Dale, who appeared in the triptych "Split-level with 3 bedrooms and 2-1/2 baths, rec room and den, cathedral ceiling, breezeway." It's 1985 and she's in her early 40s, divorced for five years, with a seventeen-year-old son who's spending the weekend with his father. Not having any plans, she gets in her car and heads off. She thought she'd cruise around the neighborhood—only about a half hour from where she grew up, but almost the same, another New Jersey suburb shouldering alongside others, crowding like kids in the back seat, their grunts and groans and shoves and paltry complaints—new in the 1950s—routine now. She knew it all well, and wondered when or whether she'd start to hate it—you're supposed to hate the suburbs, right? Even more deeply than those who didn't live in them—because you knew its false promises and outright lies—at least that's what everyone tells you, and what you're supposed to tell yourself...

  [Another story about Lee and Jay (from "You Won't Die”) now in college, wandering around the city.] Before Burger King: on the bus, near the back. Lee sat staring out the fogged window, forehead on the plastic, some wet snow still striking the bus half-heartedly. Jay was asleep. He could nod off anywhere, wake up immediately—no befuddled glancing around, no stretching or yawning; just awake and himself. Lee heard voices near the exit door, about three seats ahead of him. They were sharp and rose in volume. Jay woke up and watched along with Lee—and with most of the bus. Two young men were yelling at each other, their noses close. The one nearer the door reached into his pocket and everyone who could, hit the deck, now also yelling. Lee looked up at the driver he secretly called Sarge. Older, about 50, his salt-and-pepper hair high and tight, probably the same cut he’d had since Korea almost thirty years ago. Even seated, you could tell he was big, a stolid citizen with a nar...

Decided a few months ago to write poems about different kinds of giants. I got about three in and it petered out. But I'd like to keep it going. Maybe. Giants #1: The Peikko In Finland, do naughty children still clasp hands over mouths because the peikko will come  and bore holes in teeth? It’s a giant if it wants, smaller or invisible if it likes, sometimes centuries asleep, disguised as a rocky ridge or tumbled boulders in a valley, motionless— until its “stony sleep” is shattered by naughty children, whose teeth suffer same. I prefer the snowy sunlit ridge,  the sloping shadowed tree-strewn valley, the ravishing beauty I assume in Finland; but who am I to stay the hand and plead,  imagine that the peikko would relinquish its guilted pleasure?

(This is another story with Ed and Frankie, who appeared in the triptych "Split-level with 3 bedrooms and 2-1/2 baths, rec room and den, cathedral ceiling, breezeway"; the story takes place two years later. The boys are on a covered platform at the top of a big jungle gym, and a girl, Bobbi Kirsch, 12 , has joined them.) Bobbi had a broad face and a high forehead. Her eyes were large and direct, with grey-blue pupils, and her long hair was reddish brown and made up of loose curls. And her mouth seemed like it was always just about to smile—or maybe laugh. She was a little taller than the two boys, and she was wearing a Kelly green bathing suit. She climbed quickly, looking up at them, and lifted herself onto the platform. She stood over them, her back to the fireman’s pole. “Hi, Ed,” she said, and glanced at Frankie, who said, “Hi.” “What’re you doing up here?” she asked. “I saw some bikes over near the water fountain.” “We walked,” Ed said.  “There was a spider up here,” Fra...

I wrote a poem a year or so ago about a young woman who buys some second-hand records, including The Monkees' "Daydream Believer." I'm thinking of re-working it as a story featuring  Bobbi Kirsch, who appears in a short story about a boy getting hurt at a playground. She was 12 in the story, which was set in 1966, so she'd be at the perfect age for falling in love with the band. Or I could flash-forward Bobbi to the present, where she'd be in her mid-'60s. In either case, the poem would need to be drastically reworked. This may not be a good idea. (and it may not be a good poem!) We shall see. Here's the poem: Daddy’s Home She really liked The Monkees, so she bought an old turntable and spent good money—too much, she thought— on a stack of 45s she’d picked up here and there  at yard sales, flea markets, open-door garages  with a few dejected hopefuls milling. But “Daydream Believer” is the saddest happy song— she was disappointed when she saw them goof...

Reminiscing about one thing and another, my wife recently mentioned an elderly lady in her neighborhood that had a little candy store set up in her home. I'm not sure if I want to write a story that focuses on her, or a story about the kids who bought candy from her, or what. I just like the wish-fulfillment image, maybe cheerful, maybe melancholy, of a neighbor with candy set up in rows on a card table in her living room, the Hummel figurines and wing-back chairs, the big mirror on the wall and the crowd of family photos—or maybe none. We'll see.

(This is an excerpt from a story about two brothers, Gary and Don, the latter disappearing in 1986. Here, the brothers go the Pine Barrens in 1984, the spring before Gary enters college.) Don was still living at home when Gary graduated from high school, and later that May they drove out into the Pine Barrens. They made a stop at the monument for Emilio Carranza, the “Lindberg of Mexico,” a little man with big dreams—Mexico City to New York and back again—who had crashed on his way home in the ‘20s. Some Pineys picking blueberries found his body; later, they put up a granite block way out in the Wharton State Forest, miles away from anything. It was a sunny day, hot and humid for spring. They sat at the base of the monument, an Aztec eagle carved into the granite above. Don started talking about Gary going off to college, and his voice was soft, as though he didn’t want anybody else to hear him. “Gary,” he almost whispered, “when you leave, don’t look back. Mom and Dad'll be fine, ...

(This is an excerpt from a story in which Pete (the child from "Among the Pioneers") goes to a matinee at a mall in 1965 and is terrified by  The Fly . But before he enters the theater, he wanders the mall with his mother, who lets him explore a bookstore.) ... he recently discovered not only how to read but why—for the same reason that, when he saw a closed door, whether in curiosity or fear he wanted to open it—she set him loose in the bookstore to look through Dr. Seuss books and  Go, Dog, Go!  and  Scrappy the Pup —even though he thought of them as little kid books, compared to his comics; but he loved the pictures, big and simple or fine-drawn and scratchy, with intricate details or just blotches of color floating in the background. Like Alice, he would never entirely lose his preference for books with pictures and conversations. But he also found himself in the Humor section, where paperback reissues of 1950s E.C. comics lurked, the old  Mad  with its...

  (This is the opening of a story about two boys—who appear as college students in another story—deciding to take a risk.)  According to Lee and Jay, it never snowed—well, sure it snowed, it had snowed all night, a good six inches on the ground—but still, it hardly ever snowed, so the two boys leaped on this opportunity like a singing frog on a lily pad, straight and solid and shining with the sun shining on the snow that soon would be crusted on their clothes. They had bundled up in twos: socks over socks, pants over long johns, coats over jackets, mittens over gloves, caps over caps; if possible, they would’ve worn two pairs of buckle boots. Lee and Jay; names like two little birds; first Lee, nine, who slid his sled to Jay’s; then Jay and Lee eventually quick through the streets—stopping only four times for snowplowed king-of-the-hill jousts—then trudge across a field and towards a pond, walk around it and there’s the hill. —But before the hill: Jay, nine and a half, who h...

[This is the opening to a story about a young boy who wanders into a stand of trees and finds a small but central mystery.] It was all quarter-acre lots with smallish houses—five models to choose from: two split-levels, two ranches, one Colonial—leaving plenty of lawn, border hedges, trees and shrubs, vegetable patches and flower beds replacing the peach orchard that once stood—then in 1952 bulldozed into a moonscape, with only a dozen or so big oaks and maples allowed to remain here and there (the future owners arriving just in time to tell the woodman to spare that tree); but by 1962 it had filled with flora as people from across the Delaware moved in and surrendered to the urge to stake their claims with not merely chain-link fences and and property-line markers but gushing verdant exuberance, seemingly managed and manicured—but waiting for a chance to evade the mowers and hedge trimmers and pruning shears and limb saws, and rise in Edenic triumph once more, always growing to return...