The poem is set in a real place, on the beach outside a house owned by my nephew in Mexico. A whale washed up there some years before, and by the time I visited, it was simply great ivory rib bones rising from the sand. My children would play inside them, embraced by the skeletal remains.

Recently:
   Front Page: September
   Fictionaut Five: Anne Leigh Parrish
   Checking in with Like Birds Lit

Anything that happens to me in this life happens in a story for someone else.

Recently:
   Checking in with Zero Faves

I just recently earmarked a quote from Montgomery Clift: “If you look really close at things, you’ll forget you’re going to die.”

Recently:
   Checking in with Flash Party
   Fictionaut Five: Antonya Nelson
   Front Page: July

I wrote the poem a long, long time ago in 1977 when I was 26. I remember the image just coming to me at the time. In fact, that whole stanza just came to me in a rush.

Recently:
   Checking in with Paris, France

I’m just a storyteller. There are half a dozen people who live within ten miles of me who can sit in front of a gas station and spin a better story while eating a bag of chips than I can during a three hour session at the computer.

Recently:
   Checking in with Ibbetson Street Press
   Fictionaut Five: Terri Kirby Erickson
   Luna Digest, 7/5

This kind of guy is insecure, always tucks his shirt in and wears his pants on the high-side. He parts his hair to the right and has had the same haircut since he was five, although the bald spot growing in the middle of his head disturbs him deeply. He likes to experiment with moustaches.

Recently:
   Checking in with Couples
   Fictionaut Five: Roddy Doyle

With flash I think you have to jump right in – BANG! – yet still retain some mystery so it propels the reader through your story.

Recently:
   Checking In With Narrative Medicine
   Fictionaut Five: George Singleton

I wanted to write something that met some of the requirements of the suspense genre. And that is to hook the reader quickly, hold tight, and set the plot in motion.

Recently:
   Checking in with Dirty Theologians
   Fictionaut Five: Roy Kesey

In this story, I wanted that ambivalence, the unanswerable question of gender to be as haunting as the story itself.

Recently:
   Line Breaks: “White Bread” by Jessica Anya Blau
   Fictionaut Five: Timothy Schaffert

   New Twitter Feed: @FictonautRx

Life is full of real anxiety, and some people, additionally, have a brain hard-wired with neurobiological anxiety. For those people, the ones wired for anxiety, the world is twice as hard I believe. I may be one of those people.

Recently:
   Checking In With New Sun Rising
   Fictionaut Five: Sarah Salway
   Checking In With The Fictionaughties
   Line Breaks: “Diversion” by Meg Wolitzer