The return is the most difficult part; the thin membrane that separates the world from the quest is harder than diamonds. The hero pushes, he leans, he tries to reorder his atoms in the shape of a shepherd, a monk, a maiden.

She liked drinking in parking lots, that was my favorite thing about her. We’d go to the liquor store and buy a case of beer, or a fifth of whiskey, or a bottle of wine, or a box of wine, or sometimes even champagne, or other times a random assortment of those small, single-serving, airport-sized bottles of whatever they kept at the counter.

Marcy is fat and ugly but she gives good head so she rarely sleeps alone which is not to say she’s not lonely. Marcy is not, in fact, ugly, but she might as well be.

Come in close and I will teach you a lesson. You will fall down. They will swing-shoulder to arm to hand, and it will strike you on the cheek. Your neck will spin backwards like the woman’s hair in the second row. Get up. They will blink. Their eye might sparkle. They might open their mouth.

Gray freeways swoop and spiral above her, with blue sky sometimes peeking through. The roadway loops below her, with green grass and parking lots sometimes visible. She drives in arcs, down and around and up and around. Her rental car accelerates powerfully, smoothly, and smells of upholstery cleaner and stale cigarette smoke.

Wow. Thanks for having me. And sorry about the shorts. I didn’t realize the other readers would be dressed so nicely. And thank you, JoAnn, for that essay about your kid. Kids do say the darnedest things. Keep sending it out. Editors are bastards.

In the summer of 1972, after weeks of consuming only avocado fuzz and free coffee from a local Midas Muffler Shoppe, a gifted oracle named Arthur emerged from his tent to impart the following vision to his neighbor, a burgeoning young crooner with the voice of an incandescent castrati: “If you get caught between the moon and New York City, the best that you can do is fall in love.”

A substitute walked into our 6th grade math class. He was thin and old and wearing a black suit. A frayed cuff appeared from under his sleeve as he tapped out a name full of Ys and Zs on the board. In a measured voice, he read out the instructions from our teacher. “There is a work sheet,” he said. “You can complete for homework if you do not finish today.”

Bill was fired for killing too many flies in front of the customers. He folded his apron, black, with the coffee shop’s cutesy, punned name on the front, into a small square — to save face. Jimmy, the boss who was three years older than Bill and stupider, took the apron from his hand and shook it like something dirty, unfolding it. He followed Bill back inside the store, holding the black cloth and smirking.

Sex is a series of tubes. One tube going into another, that’s all it is when you get right down to it. The electrical grid, sewage system, subways, phone lines, hell, more than half the infrastructure of this thankless nation: tubes.

From 2010: Where it all started.