The woman in my dream was screaming from the back of the church "Imagine loving God so much that you stop eating. When he died he weighed ninety pounds..." A funeral, then. Whose, I don't know. I can see the dead man is incredibly thin, and old, and appears to be naked. There is another man, his brother, who has pulled his legs up so they're draped over the end of the casket. These people are Pentecosts. Another woman stands--she is also a Pentecost--and stops the first woman from screaming, then turns to the rest of the congregation.

Groping on the bed, a tangle of exploring fingers and the intermingling of one another's breath. Shrugging tentatively out of clothes, clumsy with acts done smoothly a thousand times previous. Asking "is this all right?" and receiving an almost mute, breathless afirmation. Slight surprise at the sudden warmth. Moving faster, in sync. Partners for a common goal. Thinking "it's finally happening," the burden finally cast off. And oh how nice this is, and oh how worth the wait. But things don't end smoothly. They don't end at all. "What's wrong?" Concern, dismay. "Well, there goes my career in adult film."

It's been a year today and some hours since your uncle came and delivered the news, and you sat up for two hours with the nonsensical television spewing at you, and you went off to bed and did not dream and did not cry. It's been a year today and he still has not left your thoughts. And you can still see him staring blind at the cieling, shaking the bed with his huge, rattling breaths. You can still feel the pain radiating from him, the catheter at his bedside full of dark yellow piss and clotted ribbons of blood.

It happened a long time ago. The eighth grade, probably. Byron Thomas and Mickey Poole. Neither one liked the other, and all day had been pacing around each other like a couple of tomcats. It finally blew up during lunch, when Byron playfully acted as if he were going to snatch a sausage from Mickey's plate and Mickey stood and said "Don't touch my weenie, bitch," and the two of them went out and took turns bloodying each other's noses and rolling around in the dirt until Coach Franklin stopped them. Even now, years later, people still talk about it.

We told him he was a fool for even going out with her in the first place. She had him hooked through the prick, though, and he followed her every dictate like a man without an ounce of self respect. We called her "Jesus" for her hypocritical religious beliefs. And then they split up and we rejoiced. And years later got back together and we cringed. He told me they were engaged and I didn't believe him. They were married two days before he shipped out. And it's blown up in his face. The poor bastard. We told him so.

He was eighteen, he said, and he was a man now, and nothing we said could reign him in. And he packed his possessions in a battered old truck, oblivious to all the people he'd hurt, and left. And he remained gone for nearly a full year, returning for his aun't funeral after she'd suddenly dropped dead in her yard going for the morning paper. He stayed on, and became a fixture in town and got a job and a wife. Eventually his drinking cost him everything and he moved in with his mother and lived off her forgiving generosity.

We all watched when Robert Wadlow walked through town, striding along on his great spindly legs like some impossible bird. It was those legs, scissoring so slow and ponderous, that would be his downfall, when the braces he wore to help him stand rubbed him raw and became infected. And when he died they can to see the world's tallest man, just shy of nine feet, the giant felled at last. I often wondered what he thought when he looked down at us, imprisoned in his lonely tower of flesh. We all watched when Robert Wadlow walked through town.

The old man sat before a crumbling green wall and played a guitar that was given him by his grandfather when he was but a little boy. A group of children came to him at midday to listen, because unlike others his age he didn't lecture or talk about when he was a child. He just played, and they listened and whispered among themselves. They did not whisper in English. And they craned their necks to watch the foreign jets fly over. The old man felt sory for them. Their future would not be as pleasant as this very moment.

The Poetry Collector travelled around, going from place to place, and he collected all the poems that were given him. In many ways he was not unlike a tax collector, but a tax collector took his orders and carried a letter of authority from the king. The Poetry Collector carried no letter of authority, but he took his orders from God. He would talk to a man fishing a river or a housewife hanging laundry, or he would talk to children playing in the dirt, and would listen to their little stories and move on, their poetry in his heart.

Walter put his napkin down and began to tell us how bad things had gotten. All these Iranians that own all the gas stations are selling cigarettes and beer to minors--he saw it happen one morning and when he asked the clerk why he pretended he didn't understand. And then, just last year, the wife of a friend from work left her dog in the car while grocery shopping and while she was inside a Vietnamese family stole it and took it back to their home and by the time the cops got there they'd already eaten it.

Her father was the first man from our state to travel into space, and the year after he died the chamber of commerce got together and raised a great deal of money and erected a statue of him in the city park near the bandstand. After he came back, her father gave speeches and made appearances at Fourth of July picnics, smiling and waving to the housewives who harbored secret lusts for him. Sometimes she would come to him and ask "what was it like? Space?" Her father would cough and rattle his paper. "Cold," he'd say, his mind elsewhere.

It was raining in Texarkana when the radio told me about Johnny Cash. And the DJ began playing records. "I Walk The Line" still striding stark from the speakers five decades later. The DJ came back and played more records, jokes, and I thought, this isn't right, give me something with depth, and as I passed through Atlanta still wrapped in rain they played "Sunday Morning Coming Down," the signal breaking up, static chewing the corners, until finally it was gone entirely. I hope he went out smiling into the arms of his god and the woman he loved.

Mrs. Williams had finally had it. After years of being told that her ass was too big or her pot roast too dry she crushed the skull of Ernie, her husband of sixteen years, and buried his body in the cellar. After a few weeks spent in front of the TV, she'd had enough of that too. So she decided to order another husband, from one of those mail services. Two days later she'd picked the perfect man, Sergei, from a catalog. Tall and muscular, with shoulder length blonde hair and blue eyes like Mel Gibson! She could hardly wait!

Sergei scratched at his thinning hair, the color and texture of straw, until he found one of the bugs that bit at his scalp, and crushed it between his thumb and the bars of his cage. It had been a mistake to register with this agency. He barely had room to stand, and the gruel they fed him was hardly thicker than the water, which was stale and metallic. His skin was impossibly pale from being kept indoors, and covered with a vivid red rash. Suddenly a voice came over the loudspeaker, calling his name. He was going to America.

"Don and Inez invited us over there tonight." "What did you tell them?" "I told them maybe. Probably." "I wish you hadn't done that." "What, you don't like them all of a sudden?" "I like them fine." "What's the problem, then?" "I just think there's better things to do than sit and talk to Don and Inez Cross." "Like what?" "Sleep. Watch TV. Crochet. Anything, really." "You really don't like Inez, do you?" "I like her fine." "Yeah." "What's that supposed to mean?" "You're jealous of her." "And you want to sleep with her!" "Ah hell." "We're not going tonight." "Fine."

It was as much a surprise to me as anybody when my best friend Andy Papiere--"Andy Paper" we called him--and his cousin Gord MacKenzie were killed in a car accident out on highway eight between Red Hill and Lewiston. It was summertime, and very hot at the funeral, and the graves were nearly side by side. While "Tears In Heaven" played, I saw my friend Hobb, who'd moved the year before. "I'm glad to see you," he said, "just not here." We stood there while they lowered the caskets and I thanked God I hadn't been with them.

There were two men sitting at the bar talking quietly about crows and ravens. "The crows are taking over the country," the first man said. "You don't never see any buzzards on the side of the road no more, just crows." "Those aren't crows," the second man corrected him, "they're ravens. Crows don't eat carrion, but ravens do." "What's carrion?" "Dead things." "Well whatever they are they're black and they're birds and they're not buzzards." This seemed to end the discussion for the two of them, and their conversation drifted. Nothing important was pondered and no conclusions were reached.

He lay on his bed in the darkness listening to sad music that moved him and felt sorry for himself and his position. Living at home again was exactly as bad as he feared it would be. He'd bad to move back after he lost his job at the detergent factory and couldn't pay his rent. He'd dropped out of school too, and spent most of his days in bed, either asleep or reading. Twenty-two next month and nothing to show for it. He sighed and turned the radio up. He'd kill himself but for the indignity of a funeral.

There was a homeless woman who lived in the street in San Antonio where Abby lived, not far from the river. She would stand on the sidewalk as people passed by and scream profanities at them, but she was otherwise harmless. And Abby felt sorry for her, and gave her some blankets for the cold. The woman accepted them and then, in a quiet, calm voice said "I am not crazy. No one has talked to me in five years. I talk to myself. And I try to get their fucking attention. I am a person, you know. I exist."

Howard's nails were long and ragged, and he had clawed red tracks down his arms and chest. He was sitting in bed with three mute televisions at his feet, but he wasn't even paying attention to the flickering images dancing across their screens. Instead he was watching, with some fascination, the rotating ceiling fan. It reminded him of planes he'd flown in his youth, watching the earth below him unspool like a backward film strip. The golden jars of urine on the floor gleamed as if they'd caught the sun in flight and he sighed and waited to be weightless.

In the end it always comes down to the rain. Waking up to find it washing gently across the windows, painting them and the sky and whatever else it touches the same weary shade of gray that is beautiful in its very weariness. The slow clocking of the windshield wipers like metronomes and the inevitable roll of thunder that begins at some point beyond hearing and concludes itself as that old familiar cacophany that clatters and crashes above your head. A cool day of sleep and peace and books and blankets, listening to the world outside singing itself to sleep

This afternoon at Wal-Mart I saw a boy with an honest to god rat-tail mullet. He was browsing among the bargain priced VHS tapes, every few minutes stopping to ask his mother for a movie in a pleading, whiny voice. "No, goddammit," she snapped, and grabbed his elbow. "We've got to go." Poor bastard, I thought, watching her drag him back to whatever white trash hell he dealt with every day of his life. My last glimpse of him before they turned the corner near the jewelry counter was of his mullet hanging dejectedly down the back of his neck.

Looking back, if you ask him, he will describe those golden two weeks they spent together in the last half of May, driving up the east coast on interstate 95, as the best of his life. He'd never been in love before, and has never been more in love since, and the world he'd come to view with a kind of weary, naive cynicism had opened up to him all its previously unmet and unknown possibilities. He never expects his life will again reach such great heights. But then, he is young, and foolish, and doesn't know any better.

I met Bill Berry once, in a used record store in Port Sulfur, Louisiana, which is about as far south as you can travel in Louisiana, just an insignificant jut of land that pokes out into the gulf. I went over to him (he was looking at some ratty old George Jones records) and struck up a conversation. I asked what he was doing in such a place. "You know," he said, "the usual." He was very polite, and soon excused himself. I never found out why he was there. Nobody believes me when I tell them about it.

He was a poet who spent all his time indoors. He never ventured out, if he didn't have to, preferring the perfect silence of his desk and the faint scratchings of pen on paper. It was much easier to imagine than experience. He was lazy that way, and also afraid of people, though he hid his fear behind a veil of scorn. He'd go out if he wasn't so scared. But instead he carefully considered writing a long poem about kids and cars and the night, contemplated with some satisfaction the way he'd skillfully written the word "September," and began.

There you are, in a dream, always dreaming...You're in a small town, now, in your dream, and you find yourself drifting silent through a parking lot lined with cars in the gray predawn of a winter's day, stepping over scattered cigarette butts arranged in crude circles, and you enter the gas station. Still there is no sound, but everything in the store is in crisp, clear contrast to the outer dark. And you take to a booth and you take out a large silver knife and begin cutting your fingers off. There is no pain, and very little blood.

Alan the cowboy killer rode along in silence save for the clink of his harnesses. As he rode he listened for anything out of the ordinary that might signal an ambush. He had gained a reputation as a killer of seventeen men though he was barely that many years old. Like many young men in the West his talent for instintive savagery had served him well, and he was always prepared for the day when some other young man would seek him out to kill him. He knew it would eventually happen. And he rode on through the friscolating dusklight.

There was a statue in the city park of the local hometown hero. He had made it big before the second world war as a cowboy singer and sometime actor. He was wearing his hat and boots, and his faithful horse stood behind him, its long head cocked one side like the RCA dog. Families would come to the park and look at the statue, and teenagers would climb on the horse's back and photograph each other. The statue, of course, remained mute. A silent reminder to anyone who saw that they would never reach even these modest heights.

You should have seen her in 1947. God, she'd been beautiful--dark, reddish hair and long, athletic legs, an easy, friendly smile, and those eyes, god, those eyes...She'd broken who knows how many hearts when she got married and quit her job at the diner. All the old men had to find someone else to flirt with. And to see her now you'd never know she was anything than what she's become: another old woman, that's all. Her husband dead these three years, she passes what time she has left alone in a big house with her ungrateful grandson.

The boys had passed by the darkened house three times now, but Charley still hadn't gotten up the nerve to go and grab their target: a five-foot tall plush elf that had been used in last year's Christmas float. The three of them had noticed it out on the porch earlier, and made up their minds to steal it. Finally, on the forth pass Jimmy sighed. "Fine, I'll get it." He snuck quietly to the porch, snatched the elf and flung it into the truckbed with a gleeful "Whee!" and they tore out of the driveway with a screeching of tires.