James saw they had swapped his old high school football field from grass to astroturf this year on Facebook. His buddy had tagged him in a post by the local reporter, with pictures of the contractors covered in the little black pellets. Behind them were ten-feet-tall roll-ups of earth, the last remnants of the sod James had helped set all those years ago.
Read MoreThe hairy goalkeeper, who has a forehead like a knuckle, stands over me, saying, “You’re gonna miss, faggot,” and my teammate Rhodes Noggelsmann, a usually soft-spoken, cerebral kind of guy, steps in and says, “Back off, Australopithecus assholus,”
Read MoreThere is a curious vacuum just after anything breaks, a brief untroubled stillness that anger and mourning can’t yet disturb, and in it what is seen most clearly is whatever has been lost. O’Hara first saw the ground rush toward him, the infield’s pebbly red-brown filling up his vision, then in that improbable serenity that sets in just after realizing something is terribly wrong, his last moments of safety were recalled in a kind of vivid, morbid slow-motion:
Read MoreAfter the Spurs won the lottery, they told him, “I hope you like barbeque.” There’s a big spread in the box suite in the Alamodome, the stadium built for a football team that never came, too big for basketball, the nosebleeds too far from the court to make out who is who.
Read MoreSpring is the windiest time of year in New Mexico. Each spring, when green catkins bloom on the cottonwood at yard’s edge, and flat, triangular-shaped leaves shimmer in the wind and emit a rustling sound calm and peaceful like water flowing in a brook, they would put in the garden—the father and his two sons, Pete and Tomás.
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