She orders salad. A few bites in, she thinks, why always salad? Fuck salad!

She is walking over the bridge between the north and south ends of town. Beneath her the creek rages and roils with spring runoff.

UMPIRE CHANG DELCHANG • CHAMPION EGG • VERNOR CANDINESS • TOMAS • GRAVE LIMPET • MUNDEN HAMMENPLATZ • OL' BEN • MITSY III • JASON PEPSI • EARSLEY KENTON JR. • HEAVENY • PASTOR MINK • CHIVE ENJOY • SEVEN MYSPACE • MO EARP • V. C. D. B. PLAQUE • CAL CATFAN • TED THE ELDER • HEATHER JANE AMANAPLAN • TOASTY RUTH • MOONSPAWN LIKERS • D'TUB • SINGLES DANCEPARTY • EVENY WATERS • OVERLY CHANCE-WINTRELS, EDITOR • EAMONN MUST'VE, SERIES EDITOR

In this town, there are people who like deer and people who dislike deer. The people who like deer dislike the people who dislike deer, and the people who dislike deer also dislike the people who like deer.

When I arrived at Pohatcong Package Place, I would reach into my pocket and pull out my allowance money. Then I’d open the door and step into the air-conditioned, busy closeness of the place. Pohatcong Package Place was a liquor store. It’s gone now. It couldn’t have occupied more than 500 square feet, despite clearly having been originally designed as a residence—a little brick bungalow, probably of 1930’s design. What was once probably a sharply sloped front hard had been dug down to street level to create a small parking lot, surrounded by grassy embankments. Behind the counter stood Nick Varhal, the owner of Pohatcong Package Place.

Which is where she should have thought to look for the notebook: beneath the radiator she had set it down upon when the phone rang.

She sits up in bed and she says, “I’m going to make some toast. I’m going to eat it in bed.”

She and he are talking loudly, to be heard over the noise of the machines outside.

The Ahab smells like a radio manufactured in the nineteen-seventies that is about to, but has not quite yet, burst into flames. It smells like dog shoes the dog refused to wear that have since fallen into a box of moth flakes. It smells like a copyright-violating bootleg action figure lying at the bottom of last year’s school backpack. It smells like a roll of orthodontist’s x-ray film shoved into the back of a drawer full of old lollipops. It smells like the inside of a skateboard helmet just removed from the head of a child who earlier the same day swam in a heavily algal lake or stream. It smells like expired antidepressants. It smells like a pile of slightly moldy megachurch hymnals. It smells like a sterile bandage designed exclusively for use on eels. It smells like a nursing home on a fishing boat.

A good generic title is a vessel into which meaning can be poured, by both the writer and reader. (My favorite of my own titles—by a wide margin—is Familiar, because it connotes so much that that novel attempts to address: the family, of course; the uncanny; the notion of a magical companion, a familiar.) Away from its antecedent, the generic title goes unnoticed; it’s something anyone might say, at any time. But once it is in place on the book cover, gravitational lines bend towards it. The generic title doesn’t try to impress you—it tries to indicate that the book itself will impress you.

Because everyone had said not to. Because the sunshine. Because the solitude. Because he felt invincible.

Her phone is ringing. She’s awakened by the ringing of her phone. But that’s not right, because she turns her phone off at night.

She is in the stationery store to buy her daughter a birthday card, as she does every year, and happens across the section marked SYMPATHY.

A cat is pursuing an insect across a wooden floor. He, the cat, is torn between the desire to eat the insect, which is his ultimate aim, and the desire to prolong the chase.

Your therapist’s office is large, comfortable, and clean. There’s a couch, but only in the waiting room, which is much larger than the consulting room, which is where the therapy takes place and which contains only chairs. Your therapist sits in a wheeled office chair, and you sit in an armchair. There’s another armchair that remains empty—presumably it is used for couples therapy. You often imagine that whomever you are talking about in therapy—you’re always talking about somebody or other, and the complexities of their interface with you—is sitting there, nodding as you speak.

The very fastidious man cleans his apartment before he leaves on a trip.

This is what I carry in my left front pocket. It’s small, strong, and effective, and more secure than a back-pocket wallet. When I need to spend cash, I move the clip to the corner of the card pile. Then I accept my change, reorganize the bills, and replace the clip. I keep my two most-used cards on the outside of the stack and can slide them out without loosening the clip.

For one thing, it is always delightful to bring a device not associated with the home into the home, for domestic use. It’s like having a whiteboard in your living room, or a forklift in the garage. When I'm working, and get up for a glass of water, I feel like I’m actually taking a "break" from "work." There used to be a water cooler at my actual job, as well, but during the budget cuts five years ago our now-deposed department chairman had it removed, in an attempt to appease the budget gods. He also stopped serving coffee at meetings. We have a new chair now, and the coffee's back, but not the water cooler, and so my house feels more like my office these days than my office.

Life is composed of three-quarter-inch square matrices of what used to be whole grain oats, but now includes “corn flour, whole wheat flour, and rice flour.” Original Life has a mild, sweet flavor and a fine crunchiness that gives way, in the mouth, to a kind of gritty paste. (That sounds gross but it’s actually delightful. I mean, everything turns to paste in your mouth.) My favorite part of any box of Life has always been the bottom, where the last few fully intact units of cereal reside in a debris dune of sugar crystals and World—Trade-Center-ruins-like broken lattice.

Now the walk is getting annoying again. The guys driving farm machinery and dump trucks on Game Farm don’t give a rat’s ass that you are a helpless soft pink animal and will not move over to give you space. And those ag school professors are eager to get home to their woodstoves and presidential biographies and may not notice you there in the gloom of the posted experimental forest. Turn right, with relief, onto Route 366, and pass through Varna.