The last person Fletcher was expecting when he answered the door was Satan. "May I come in?" The Devil asked, lifting his hat uncertainly, and Fletcher, after a moment, stood aside and let him in. The Devil removed his hat and looked around him, and complimented Fletcher's taste in decoration and design, and Fletcher thanked him and offered a seat and a drink. They sat together in silence and Fletcher observed the fine cut of Satan's suit and his expensive hat and briefcase. Finally the Devil looked at him and smiled warmly. "Now," he said, "about that soul of yours..."

Woody and his brother Roger were down at Pruitt's Lake, fishing off the bank a mile from the boat ramp. They'd discovered the spot last summer and had made a pact to keep the location secret. Woody was twelve, Roger nine. "Watch it!" Woody yelled when Roger cast his line too near, and clipped him sharply on the ear. Roger didn't say anything, and moved over while Woody lit a cigarette. He'd started smoking in the last few months, and hitting Roger. So when the monster came out of the water and carried Woody off, Roger didn't mind too much.

The travelling salesman's boots clocked one after another up the front walk. He'd been travelling a long time and had just that day made eighty miles and twenty-one homes, and he was dog-tired and sore all over, particularly in his shoulders, which ached from carrying the large case that held within the apparatus he sold, which did many wondorous things too varied and amazing to go into detail here. It was beginning to get dusky, and the streetlights would be lighting up any minute now. The warm air hummed with crickets as he knocked on the door.

He and his grandmother were driving home at night from his aunt's house, darkness and fifty-five years between them, in silence, his eyes scanning the passing roadside illuminated by the yellow smear of the headlights for any deer that might dash out in front of the car. He fiddled with the radio but nothing seemed appropriate, and he finally put in a cassette--Red Headed Stranger--and they were wrapped up in nylon guitar tones. They continued in silence for a few more miles, and he gradually noticed her singing quietly beside him, and his heart suddenly swelled with love.

The bombed-out husks of empty buildings in downtown Texarkana, Texas offered up nothing to the girl walking down Swinton Street pushing a baby carriage. The baby inside did not stir nor give voice, as it was molded from pinkish plastic instead of blood and bone. This did not stop the girl, who was sucking on a grape lollipop, from talking to the lifeless infant or stopping to adjust the heavy blankets (much too hot for a real baby, in this summer heat). "Look," she said, pointing to the contrails of a jet, oblivious to the piteous glances of passersby, "airplane!"

Jonas, that old fraud! He was always showing off, doing magic tricks or somersaults, showing us his tattoo (a series of numbers), anything to please the girls, who shrieked in delight and ran away in mock terror. He had been born in Europe, to Gypsies, and he could tell fortunes or unhinge his jaw like a serpent. One night I found him in the backseat of his adopted parents' Plymouth, purchased just after the War, sobbing quietly and reading a postcard written in some language I couldn't read. When he saw me he jumped out of the car and ran inside.

Bored beyond reason in the motionless summer air, heat lightning flashing distant beacons on the unreachable horizon. Stir listless through empty books and sketch emptier words in a battered notebook or search the rattling static of the television or radio, nothing will find a way to calm your restless nerves and sleep is nothing at this point but a bitter fevered joke. So drive, go to the car and roam the honeycombed backroads, craving the illusion of progress suggested by forward momentum. Plunging straight ahead into whatever fate that may be found on the way from here here to somewhere else.

I saw the man once, in February, two years ago with Shaun, a friend of mine. He stood there, dressed like Hank Williams, the hat casting a shadow over his face, so that maybe he was Hank Williams, or just himself, years ago, when he changed everything. He moved onstage, not dancing, but feeling the music the band behind him was putting out. People cheered, and talked about naming their children for him, and I watched him, and I knew that I was seeing something special. The lights flashed over the crowd and he asked "How does it feel?"

Peter Pan unlatched the window and stepped inside, careful not to snag his shadow on the loose nail. He was smiling, as he usually was when he came to see Wendy, thinking of the things they had done on his last visit, things he'd never thought of before. He remembered the way she had pressed her lips to his ear and whispered to him just as he lost his breath and began to shudder against her. He he was going to tell her tonight that he wanted to stay, and get older like she had. He knew what growing up was now.

Susan Oh, my best friend from childhood, her mother had grown up in Oregon, and she told us that she had lived next door to the childrens' author Beverly Cleary until she was fifteen and her family moved to Arizona. According to Mrs. Oh, Beverly Cleary had been a very nice woman that often baked cookies for her childrens' friends, and who knew the names of most of the kids in the neighborhood. Her hands were usually stained a purpleish black color by the typewriter ribbons she used to write her stories, which she did, quietly at home alone during the day.

Peter made his way quietly down the hallway, past the gentle buzz of her parents' snores, and then he began to open the door when a sudden noise froze him where he stood. It was a low moaning, coming from inside, a girl's. Wendy's. And then another voice, a whispered male's saying "your father will hear!" Peter slowly opened the door, just a crack, and saw Wendy, her back to him, straddling someone whose face he couldn't see, her head thrown back, gasping as she ground her hips against his. Peter shut the door and turned to go. Now he knew.

The click of the zippo and the flare as the tip of the cigarette caught fire and burned bright orange, illuminating our faces where we stood. The sharp inhalation of smoke, the initial punch as it made its way to the lungs and then rushed dizzily outward, floated like an insubstantial halo above everyone's heads and then slowly vanished in the air. And our lungs and our hearts continued their tasks despite our best efforts to make them cease. The music thudded from inside the club and someone coughed and someone said something and someone laughed and then we left.

Despite his tendency to make comments about her ass or legs, despite the fact that he would sometimes press against her and "accidentally" brush her breasts, his breath short and sharp, rigid penis pressing the small of her back, she didn't complain. She enjoyed the effects she had on him. She knew after one of his accidental gropes he locked himself in the bathroom and mastrubated furiously. She made sure to make eye contact with him every time he emerged, thrilled at the embarrased look on his face. She knew who held the power, and decided not to wear underwear tomorrow.

On the last day of his life there were certain things he did. He took some items--pornography, mainly, but also some certain letters and photographs of a personal nature--and threw them into a dumpster across town, for he was a private person; and he cleaned his house from top to bottom: no great task, for he was a clean person as well; and left behind instructions as how to distribute his personal effects (books, records, clothes). He then dressed himself very neatly and drove out to a nearby bridge. He left his driver's liscense behind to identify his body.

After the rain stopped and the clouds rolled thundering past, they emerged from their shelters. Some wore the skins of animals. Some stood naked, unashamedly scratching themselves in view of the others. In unison they walked to the center of their dwellings and began gathering stones from the mud and constructed a crooked altar there. They did not understand why they did this, or if they did they could not give voice. After the altar was complete, they found their greatest hunter, crushed his skull with a stone, and lay his body out for a god they did not know.

Everyone she knew, as well as the whims of her heart were urging her to drop everything and go Somewhere Else, and she agreed, but at the same time wondered if her own fears wouldn't keep her grounded. And she knew that she couldn't find the life she wanted just by leaving and hoping to find it waiting for her somewhere else. And she also knew that though the cities shimmered, most of America looked exactly like her everyday surroundings. She could stay here for now, and revel in the glory of decay. Life would wait for her.

"Have a good day," Reuben said to his son as he pulled his jeep up to the curb. Kevin made a noncommital grunting noise and climbed out and walked inside the school without looking back. Reuben sighed and pulled away. He turned on the radio and found that Kevin had changed all the presets. Angry music he didn't understand blared at him, a litany of shits and fucks. That rap shit. That damned boy was acting more like a nigger every day, his hat backward, his pants baggy, his speech slangy and slurred. Reuben didn't know what to do.

Mara was pretending to be sick. Her mother, Sylvia, had to be at work early, and her father had been in a hurry and so didn't even check to see what was wrong, just told her to go back to bed and ushered Kevin out the door. She had waited until everyone was gone and then called her boyfriend Mark. She had been seeing him for seven weeks and had in the last month started cutting class to sneak back home and have sex with him in her room, eyes rolling, gasping, amazed at how rebellious and adult she was.

Fuck. He'd missed two days and it felt like he'd failed not only himself but also the pledge he'd sort of made to try to write every single day, if he could. But his new schedule, which he'd picked up quite by accident, was quickly approaching normalcy. Great. Just what he needed: one more thing to push him toward being just like everyone else. He preferred the old days when he lived like a vampire and didn't see the sun for days. Welcome to squaresville, he thought disgustedly, population: me. He finished up the entry with a grimace. Fuck it.

Sylvia and Mara didn't get along. Hadn't for years. Mara resented her mother because she thought Sylvia was ugly, and by extension, she thought she was. Sylvia resented Mara because she thought Mara was beautiful, and she was jealous, seeing in her daughter what she once was, and would never be again. She was sitting at her desk, half asleep and thinking about how to talk to Mara about the condom wrapper she'd found. She envisioned tears, and screaming, and a prolonged, icy silence. Sylvia sighed deeply. She'd talk to her about it later. She didn't know what to do.

A pounding at the door. "What're you doing in there, boy? Wackin off?" Boots Morrison opened his eyes and sat up a little in the bathtub. "No," he said to Gene, his stepfather, though he was lying. In fact, he still held his rigid penis in one hand, was still gently fisting it back and forth. "I just fell asleep." Squish squish squish. "Well, hurry up and get your ass outta there," Gene said, "I gotta take a shit." "Okay." The sound of retreating footsteps. Boots sank lower into the lukewarm bathwater and closed his eyes. Squish squish squish.

Jasper Jeffers was the preacher at the Apostolic Lighthouse Church in Gun City, Missouri, the town I grew up in. By the time I was thirteen or so I'd had it with notions of God and the Infinite, but I wasn't telling my family that, and so I continued to go for a few more years, no matter how much I disliked it. The one highlight was Jasper's daughter, Lydia, who, to spite him, fucked everyone I knew, and even more I didn't. That's how the stories went, anyway. I was curious, but shy, and missed my chance with her.

Jasper had one eye that stared straight ahead, dead, fixed on some nonexistant point that seemed just over the shoulder of whoever happened to be in his line of sight, giving the impression that he was always looking directly at them. This is what made him such an effective preacher: people were always sure his insane rants were directed at them. It was his other eye that told the true story, rolling crazily in its socket as he shook his head and licked flecks of spittle from his lips, teeth shining beneath the crucifix, chewing his god to tatters.

Memphis, Tennessee. A disturbance on a balcony and the sound of a shot and the flash of a muzzle crowd the smell of cordite fighting for purchase in your already overloaded sense of shock. You can follow the trajectory of their fingers to find the silencer of this man whose impact I can never fully comprehend. You can stare at this black and white plot and it never makes sense. Their fingers in silhouette look like a twenty-one gun salute to a dream that lies bleeding at their feet, reaching up for its final reward. This photo does not lie.

I watched the man in the long grey coat step outside the studio, smoking a cigarette and grinning in such a way as to mask the skull beneath the flesh. He shook the few hands clustered under umbrellas and stepped with a wave into a waiting limosine that moved so slowly into the gathering rain amid cries of "we love you!" and "they'll never replace him," and I couldn't help but feel a surge of hope that he'd live forever, and I wanted to thank him for showing me a way to die with some sense of grace and dignity.

Simmons stood alone under a streetlight on some anonymous corner waiting for something to happen. He was just preparing to head home when she walked up seemingly in slow motion and his heart broke into a thousand shimmering pieces. He looked away quickly. Didn't want her to think he was staring. Plus he didn't know what he'd do if he looked again. This was it. She was the one. Suddenly a taxi pulled up and as she stepped inside he said "Hi." She looked at him. "Hello," she said. The taxi pulled away and they never saw each other again.

He clutched eighty-seven dollars in his hand, shoved into his pocket, as he stared out at the landscape flowing backward past him. He pulled the money, so old and oft-handled it felt like cloth, nearly blank from spending so much time in sweaty pockets out and began discreetly counting it. Three tens, four fives, a twenty, and seventeen ones. Good, still there. He shifted a bit and felt the handful of loose change clatter in his left pocket. Nearly three dollars there. He rolled the money back up together and put it back into his pocket and sighed.

I was riding home in my father's pickup when we topped the hill and saw coming up the road toward us a mountain lion, its thin, tawny shoulders pistoning smoothly up and down as it moved with a liquid, feline grace through the slanting golden bars of the late afternoon sunlight. It spotted us and then moved quietly into the woods by the roadside. It was over in an instant. I didn't tell anyone about it for a long time, and when I did, it was hard to explain the moment to them and what it meant to me.

She's spitting and kicking and crying motherfucker you ain't taking me nowhere as they pull her through the doorway that she latches onto with both hands, biting at them as they pull her fingers free of the jamb and take her out to the car, the neighbors all out on their early morning lawns in pajamas and nightgowns, staring with the paper in their hands as the car pulls away with her still screaming and flailing against the glass, voice cracking and breaking as she calls out for someone to help her until she feels the cold syringe and sleeps.

Jeremy Jay and Betty Felon first met at Sean Randall's party nineteen months ago. Jeremy was about four hours from breaking up with Linda, his then-girlfriend. Betty had been single for a few months and when she was introduced to Jeremy she was pretty drunk and just mumbled something about the Rat Pack and accidentally burned herself with a cigarette. Jeremy wasn't in a very good mood and so was unimpressed. But then a week later they ran into each other at the gas station, and look at them now. Inseperable. Ah, love truly is a mystery.

Write one hundred words, they said. No more or less, and when you are done you will have found the heart and the soul of what you wished to say. And I can only hope this is true, for my every move and every word are seen by me as suspect, as if my motives are lies and my beliefs are hollow and untrue. How I hope this is not the case. And so I write, full of pride and vanity and a myriad of other sins I cannot name. And then I am done for the day, and cease.