Along the horizon, south of the United States, an expanse of crenellated concrete rises out of the Pacific and vanishes into the east, making tangible the intangible: an imaginary line bisecting a land once one. Tall and proud The Wall stands. Forty feet high and twenty feet deep. Its surface unadorned with design or texture. Just flat and grey through and through. Mighty enough to thwart the charge of fifty thousand Spartans. Priam of Troy would have envied it, the great lodestar of American Jingoism.

From birth until the sixth grade, home was a room on the tenth floor of the Hotel El Dorado in downtown Los Angeles. During its heyday in the 1910s and the 1920s, the hotel stood at the foot of the Spring Street Financial District—the Wall Street of the West—amidst the Braly Building (at twelve stories tall, the city’s first skyscraper), the Hotel Alexandria (frequented by the stars of the Golden Age of cinema, Humphrey Bogart and Greta Garbo), and, just blocks away, City Hall, all regal and white, looming over the blooming metropolis. The El Dorado flourished with all in its proximity and even lay claim to its own celebrity resident in Charlie Chaplin, but by the 1960s the financial institutions fled west to Wilshire and Figueroa, and the burgeoning quarter was rendered hollow. Its splendor laid to waste.  

i am normally not the kind of dog who whistles at women on the street or stalks them with my eyes. i figure ladies have enough to worry about without some creeper giving them a hard time

Blush, I think, is the most important component when making up a corpse. I could not effectively do my job without it, I think as I apply the tiniest amount to the face of an eighty-year-old man who died of a heart attack. He must have been a drinker. I’ve been given a picture of him from when he was alive and he had ruddy cheeks.

A dead bear was sprawled on the floor between the sofa and the fireplace.  Standing outside in the garden, Philip could see it through the sliding glass doors.  He wondered whether the bear was dead or quietly sleeping, stretched out drunkenly, with one of its paws draped over an ottoman. 

Mom took off on Fridays. Left behind twenty bucks, enough white bread, ham and cheese, and chips to last the weekend. Sometimes she left enough money to buy a new game for the Nintendo.

Mark started his day with exactly what he hadn’t been hoping to start with. For the past ten months most of his mornings had started his way, with medication, a newspaper, breakfast, and two avian voices that he was equally fond and sick of hearing, because they had always given him the same excuses and reasons for coming back without the letters. He had started the mail service with these birds years ago, but age hadn’t served them well and they came home day after day with complaints or letters they forgot to actually leave at the door.