We were high drama all the time, like everything started in the third act, and somewhere in our midst was a dagger, a pistol, or something that could stop the flight of arrows in our words, cutting through memories of people we've loved, hated, and leveled out of their wits. After a year since we met, we realized that particles of Eastern Europe in her heart couldn’t quite dig the sweaty, Sub-Saharan ballads I’d pile in her voicemails. We didn’t quite melt into each other in this melting pot called California.
"A Circle of Men" by William Auten
The story I started telling you about? William. The dogman. He’s more than that now, I know, but sometimes that’s how I remember him. He goes by William now, sometimes Will, which he likes, unless he first meets people and then it’s William. You have to get to know him as Will. It comes naturally after a while, and then the wall falls down. He went by Billy for the longest time. He was someone else, too, when he was a dogman. He had another name back then, and before he was a dogman, he went by yet another name. Several names, in fact...
"Salvation Army" by Joe Oppenheimer
I always carry my hunting knife. I keep it real sharp. On my seventh birthday, my daddy taught me how to skin a squirrel. He gave me my own knife in a leather sheath when I turned 12. He had burned my initials, "L.A.," right there in the leather.
Tony teased me without mercy about that knife.
“Hey, girl, you can’t handle a knife that big! That’s a boy’s knife,” he’d say.
“So what if I’m a girl,” I’d answer my brother.
Then he just repeated my dad’s saying: “Never have a dog that’s too much for the master.”
"Turnaround in the Dark" by Sergio Troncoso
Martinez, your brain is in Iraq even when your body is in Ysleta or Kansas City. These days in the desert, like years. These days waiting for nothing to happen, until something does. Your brain on adrenalin, hyped-up, bored beyond boredom, yet still coiled like an angry Texas rattlesnake. What’s happened to you, goddamnit? Seven months in Iraq, seven scars in your brain.