Harlan came to feeling groggy, like he’d swallowed Benadryl and Scotch. He remembered taking ball one, high and outside, then squaring up for the second pitch. He’d wound his bat around a few times like a windmill, his little pre-pitch ritual to show he still, at thirty-four, meant business.
After that? Nada.
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He once took me into the woods, the farthest we could hike in a day, and made me touch a dead squirrel stretched out under a tree. I was terrified, but since it was him, I did it, and I’ll never forget the strange orange fur and the tail, somewhere between soft and bristly.
Read MoreAfter college I didn’t have any money, so my friend Ben arranged for me to fight non-sanctioned MMA matches in his basement. I wrestled in high school, had some boxing experience, so most of my opponents were overmatched—junkies, clueless gym rats, fake tough guys. Usually, I would just hip toss the dude and then pound his face in. That was my signature move. The hip toss and pound. It worked right up until it didn't.
Read MoreYou stand on the eighteenth tee box and feel the razor-sharp repair tool in your left pocket. Lately, the tool has been your financial acquisition aid and for five years, you’ve kept it sharpened for your annual three-week golf trip. Hidden from your girlfriend of three years, you have left a blood-tinged bread trail.
Read MoreHeather “Natural” Conway grew up in Waunakee, Wisconsin, a little suburban enclave fifteen minutes outside of Madison, although it might as well have been fifteen hundred miles away as little as the university town had impacted Heather’s life. She was the daughter of Donald Conway, a convicted confidence man and locally famous swindler who was serving twenty-five years in a federal penitentiary for a litany of charges that included, among other things, the formation of a bogus political action committee.
Read MoreMaddy pushed the door open to her dad’s office, slowly.
“What’s up, kiddo?” he asked brusquely, gnawing a hangnail off his finger.
“I think there’s something wrong with Mommy’s bike,” she said.
Read MoreBefore Owen reached the trail’s end, a bat screeched by, quickening his heartbeat, and he repeated what he had often been told about the creatures whose paths he crossed: they’re more frightened of you than you are of them. He repeated these words but stopped short of a mantra. He reached the trailhead and turned left to walk along the fence surrounding the tennis courts. He crossed a small field that was more of a storm drain basin and passed through the gap in the fence near the dugout. You could smell the honeysuckle on the breeze. When he dropped the duffel bag, glass clinked on metal. He was between home and first. The unchalked path was all weeds and dandelions.
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