Mother says, I’m going to hell.

Daughter says, There’s no such thing.

Mother screams, There’s no such thing? Well, then you’re an atheist! I was right!

“So, you’re the best friend,” the boyfriend says, sliding his arm around the back of Ellie’s chair. I briefly consider how quickly I might grab my steak knife and sever the digits of his right hand now making tiny circles on her shoulder.

Jonathan doesn’t respond to the employee. Through the box, he begins to blindly mash the buttons on the machine. His second hand sails through the cardboard and grips the joystick. He swings it violently, still blind to the screen.

Arachne knew that history was a tale told by the victors and human relationships and choices were far too complex to follow a logical line from one act to the next. The very fact she was sitting at a table loom in a single bedroom shack on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi with her father knocking at death’s door and her mother trying to keep the door shut on the other side was proof enough of the complexity of the fickle machine of causality.

It was as sweet and fleeting as those cherry cones. Only both of them had horizons to chase, and so much sugar dulled the senses, made truth harder to savor. Did Kate honestly bask in their banter; were they joking with the same flavor?

took him in from a narrow window of pudgy arms and a cloud of B.O. As he tracked towards me, his expression was stiff, desolate, his movement unnaturally smooth, as if he was suspended in some metaphysical expanse, unhindered by the friction of the boardwalk. We made eye contact, and it was as if I was just another face in the crowd: a cagey California blonde, a Parisian bon vivant, a stoned high schooler in search of a good time — anybody but his daughter.

By the time I get down to the basement, Jimmy and Kenny are already playing a new Sonic the Hedgehog game I’ve never seen before. Since I don’t remember buying it, and since my son doesn’t have any way to purchase it himself, that only leaves Kenny. But where he got the money is just as much of a mystery. It’s been four months since Kenny got fired from his baker’s job at Value King, and he hasn’t worked a day in that time.

The father had trudged up the small hill with a cooler full of Stag beers that he had planned to open once the station wagon was free of fishing tackle and beat up plaid suitcases. The girl had walked up the wooden uneven planks paying attention to the ground, so she could avoid snakes. Last year a corn snake had slithered across her toes. The mother slowed her steps when she saw it.