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Andrew was new to Texas, and I thought I was leaving for Peace Corps any minute. Freed by the mutual acknowledgment that this would be temporary, we glued ourselves to each other, and then six months passed in this way. One morning we woke up on a deflated air mattress in my friend Walt’s apartment…

[...] The mention of the “sabbath day” is presumably supposed to invoke the religious, to introduce the possibility of messianic time instead of mere clock time, but whatever hint of redemption the phrase carries is canceled by “1879,” which here sounds as cold and abstract as “ninety.” [...]

Each night, Rei waited until I had finished in the bathroom, before taking her shower and brushing her teeth. I would go into my own room and close the door. Then I’d hear her slippered feet in the corridor outside. I slept badly, another side effect of my medication, but I never left the room. Sin…

Laura Lipp walked into the bathroom. We stopped talking and stared. She looked like the Exorcist. She’d snuck punch from us. She was loaded.

“I’m from Apple Valley,” she said.

“We know,” everyone shouted. Sammy stood to push Laura out of the bathroom.

“But I never knew. I didn’t listen. …

An appeal to images is a demand for love. We want something more than just their mute glory. We want them to give up a clue, a key, a way to cut open a space, cut into a register, locate a tone, without which the novelist is lost.

It was with images that I began The Flamethrowers. By the time …