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Each among them had to confess to a loss.

“I lost my skill at baking cakes,” one of them ventured.

“I lost a rucksack once.”

“A ring.”

“My hair.”

“My trigger finger.” The fellow raised his hand, and it was true. It was maimed. There was no trigger finger.

“My beech trees outside L…

She appeared a somewhat older version of one of the paramedics who arrived at the house the night my father died, though it was unlikely that anyone would go from being a paramedic to being an employee at a resort that had seen better days and was, in fact, in foreclosure. Though perhaps she had ac…

From the time I was ambulatory until I was fourteen and refused to participate, every year on my birthday my father would video me going around an immense organ-pipe cactus in the city’s botanical garden. The cactus is practically under lock and key now. It could never survive elsewhere, certainly.…

I was DUI, which was so boring in the vast scheme of things and particularly in the louche gray world of the Mission. DUIs were beneath interest and I had already experienced girls looking right through me in a practiced way even though this would change if the particulars of my case became known. …

“They told me I was washing the diapers with too much bleach and that’s why the baby’s been cranky,” Ricky said. “Do you think that could be true?”

He had so wearied of her it was like an ache in his bones.

“I’ve found a good sitter,” she said. “It took me forever to find a really responsible…