Miller Time

UNITED STATES—Mary Reno once lived in cool, air-conditioned movie theaters. It corresponded to a period of unrequited loneliness and early need. She was young, not yet out of high school. Mother and father were still together, and then father would leave. He would not see her wear a graduation robe. Mother always explained that he had gone to heaven....

UNITED STATES—Wylie had a big house on Sixth Ave., near Country Club Park. The neighborhood is just as peaceful as it sounds. The house actually seemed grand with a third story added on top, but they’d done it on the cheap with aluminum window frames and you could tell it had been a later addition, but there’s still something...

UNITED STATES—I had no time to worry about the earthquake in Watsonville. Everything seemed to be falling apart at the house I was managing. The young couple from Mexico who shared the downstairs bay-window room off the other side of the kitchen had a new person living with them: Pedro’s dad from Puebla. Though his son wasn’t much more...

UNITED STATES—There was a mute hum, outside the closed liquor store and the falafel joint. The brick facade of an apartment building confronted me with a riddle in its unyielding silent night, any cue of lives dwelling within absent. Something was different: the peace signs and hearts were gone from the windows, and the curtains were gone, along with...

HOLLYWOOD—It happens when you get in a cottage courtyard and stick around long enough: somebody dies who's been here forever. It happens while the lamp is on and close enough to be heard clear as if someone was rotating a spoon in a bone-china cup. Those who keep moving on as the majority of Americans do (we move on...

UNITED STATES—Some sudden pizza's infused my psyche the moment I learned that a very great fan of my books was going to be passing through Los Angeles on a moving trip with her husband and a 52-foot truck en route from Washington state to Sun City, Arizona. This is the kind of thing to put any budding author into...

UNITED STATES—Comic strips were a window onto the world for Gilbert. They provided all his major news and gave him the veneer of being a well-informed person, aware of the latest brouhaha, literate in pop culture because artists like Sean Hillenbrand loaded their strips with such stuff as well as steadily mined a rich vein of politically incorrectness and...

UNITED STATES—Davy stands in the hallway, shoulder blades pressed to the wall. He gasps. "Relax, drink water," he says to himself. This place is hard work, draining, stressful, heart-warming. It's a crouching beast, even when all the lights are off at night, a vortex of love and suffering breathing slowly in a gargantuan ribcage. Slowly, slowly, Davy escapes the quicksand of...

UNITED STATES—Denise took a deep breath and faced her husband’s letter. The brief pause was quite enough for her daughter, Antoinette, to get her nose in her phone and check in on her media. “You didn’t post anything about this. Heaven knows we aren’t supposed to be reading this. It’s marked only ‘in the event of my death.’ And Jerry...

UNITED STATES—Doing a good deed in poor conscience really sucks. Eliza knew. She was crossing the city on a Friday night, after being held hostage by a motor mouth on a phone, either too drugged or oblivious to get the drift. Eliza was squirming, she detested procrastination, even to use the term implied a kind of compromise. And that...