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With these fingers, afraid and aware, I stroke your delicate skin.

Tobias Wolff reading two stories aloud: "Say Yes" and "Her Dog."

This was his sky, his clouds rucked up over the fields. His country.

“You’re going somewhere now,” he said. “Up to the big smoke.”

It is cruel, this business of exile and divorce. I will not deny it.

Our cocoa is gone and our dreams are being eaten by mice.

Noelle, somewhere symphony number two listens to you breathing.

Gerard sat in the shadow, watching his son steal about like a thief.

Play hero, sunburned protagonist, awake in our dream.

I think there was a center about which I never even thought to ask.

That year, the mail would arrive as white as warning, as flashing teeth.

I wish I could tell him he’s not going to hell. It would be so freeing for him.

No matter how much money there is, it can always just drain away.

His voice was wrung with panic as he spit curses like spoiled milk.

A clumsy coyote descends an old hill of garbage. Death is visiting.

I was a son again until my parents died. Even then, I felt like myself.

Unnatural as a ghost; the thought rose unbidden to his mind.

Instead, she stares right at us, her shoulder half-naked in broad daylight.

Like superstitious sports fans, we played the song night after night. Since giving birth I’d become hyperaware of death.

His spirit shone fiercely, shaming the chasm by illuminating it.

Her anger was white and cold. It sent seams of ice through my heart.

She was here. She could not go on. It was the end—the end of the world.

There was a ladder planted dead center in a field of high, thin grass.

I wonder why I feel bound to the gray-dry skin of you, the barrenness of feet.

A scene from the night before comes rushing forward like a dream.

A family becomes fossilized—a darker crosshatch etched in hard sand.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands is worth a book in itself.

He shot a spear into a boom timber and pulled the boat to it.