Wally finally had a story—a story to scare the pants off his friends. Starting tonight, he no longer would be the butt of their jokes, the “piss-pants kid,” and the least important member of the five-buddy clique.

It was Friday night, the thirteenth, and they were again in Ben’s basement rec room. One last sleepover before they had to start high school.

Ben’s house was about the biggest in the county, and his rec room was just the best place for teenage boys to hang out in a small town. The room was long and wide, a pool table at one end, ping-pong table at the other, a stone-lined fireplace in-between. A TV was hooked to a video game player, and Ben always brought down his laptop so they could explore the Internet all they wanted.

Sometimes they liked to play poker for nickels and dimes. Wally always lost. He was out a good fifty bucks this summer, so he was glad nobody lobbied for another game tonight.

But after all the games, the sodas, chips and pizza Ben’s mom provided from upstairs, the boys liked to tell scary stories. Always after midnight. Ghost stories, slasher tales, Blair Witch knockoffs, vampires, werewolves, gore-sucking aliens, bizarre mutations, mummies, and zombies—nightmare fables only teenage boys could think up and find entertaining. Each story told when they truly tried to scare the crap out of each other. Which they never really managed to do—except for Wally.

“Six feet up is better than six feet under.” This advice, given on the morning that PFC James Moran shipped out for a tour of duty in war-torn Iraq, was given by his father—a veteran of the Vietnam War who’d returned from that conflict without the use of his legs. He’d issued the warning from his wheelchair, his normally stoic face trembling at the unspoken implication that needed no elaboration. “Come back in one piece, Jimmy.”

The soldier paused on the tarmac to glance back at his wheelchair-bound father, delivering a crisp, final salute that exuded confidence. He felt invincible, and his faith was strong. He boarded the plane recalling a memorable line delivered by Father Mulcahy during a sermon he’d attended shortly after receiving his deployment orders: "Be strong, do not fear; your God will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you." As the transport plane moved toward the runway he caught a final glimpse of his father watching the plane pull away, unaware that it was the last time he’d ever see his father alive.

I have a new sedative and glucose drip.

My sister visits. She looks well and I tell her.

"Thanks," she says. "I had a weekend spa. Dad bought it for me, after all the stress."

"And the new job," I say.

"Whew," she says and wipes her hair from her forehead. "Let me tell you about the new job, Alex."  And she does. For a half hour. Everything is the same, the same as I remember from the last time she had a new job.

I walked down Teluna Lane. The ice shavings pelted right through my jacket, and the wind felt more like ice than the ice did—but I didn’t care. I liked the numbness it brought.

I shouldn’t’ve left Liz in the car, but I just couldn’t take it anymore. She was holding Mallory, rocking her back and forth, singing to her, pretending she was still alive. Pretending that her face wasn’t blue, that her eyes weren’t huge bulges, that her mouth was laughing instead of gaped open like a fish . . . that her . . . fuck it. I can’t take this.

Darren hadn’t thought of the vagina tree for nearly 20 years, but now, driving back to his hometown with a car full of belongings and a half a fifth of vodka tucked between his legs, the image was burned into his brain like a brand into a horse’s ass.

It was Mikey who found the tree, set apart in a clearing in the woods a quarter mile or so behind his house. He brought Darren there—then just 10 years old—conspiratorially on a cool Friday afternoon after school, and Darren, to say the least, had been disappointed at the initial revelation.

Tin Te. These are the two syllables that had been haunting Damien ever since he began searching for his missing brother, Luke, a year ago; two syllables that are etched in Chinese characters in the corner of the tattoo covering his brother’s back in a Dali-esque vision: an alpine landscape but where the angles seem somehow wrong and the lines waver, where the mundane rock features appear to be leering faces when you look askance and where the colouring subtly changes with his breathing; two syllables that are perhaps the artist’s name, though no-one in any tattoo studio from the St. Pauli strip in Hamburg to the wharves of Shanghai or the Camden Markets of London claims to have heard of him. Or her. He had also tried mainstream art galleries and a university library to no avail. Nor had that bible of the internet, Wikipedia, helped him in this case.

“What’s wrong, Mrs. Jackson? You seem out of sorts. Holiday stress?”

“How’d you know, Judd? Mind-reading again?”

“This time of year is always stressful, but particularly when you have a boy like . . . ” He clapped a hand over his mouth.

“Go ahead and say it, Judd.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Jackson. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How’d you mean it, then, Judd?”

It was lights out. The man on bottom bunk was Ben Ramsay, an unlucky thief who'd spent more time locked up than he had a free man. Ben was doing time for armed robbery on a truck carrying DVD players and widescreen TVs. He had five months left and he counted every day. Rudolph Feuds was on top bunk. Rudolph was relatively new inside. Ben had seen him in the yard a few times, and he walked as if not fussed about where he was. Either prison life hadn't hit him yet or he had too many screws loose and incarceration didn't bother him.

I came here on a whim after I found Elly sucking another man’s cock in our bed. The tip of her tongue was tickling his shaft as he gently held her hair back for her. Their bodies glistened with sweat and they seemed so natural. That was all I could stand to watch. My stomach clenched up tight and I had to leave. My head began to pound and I became faint. I remember walking into the kitchen and looking for something; I don’t know what because everything was hazy and I felt dizzy.

The feet were on the chair. There was no body with them; it was just a right foot and a left, resting like a pair of shoes on a department store rack.

Jenni screamed, the kind someone makes when taken by surprise. But she was in an unfamiliar, dark hotel room where things could meld and curl into what they weren’t. Had she thrown her bra on the chair? She had, hadn’t she? Those were the cups of her bra. That was it, yes. They were the cups of her bra.