Gary Fincke

Once, Alex ate the same cereal for nine months because each carton earned a square inch of Alaska. “Eighteen, all told. You earned them,” his mother said when Alex was thirty-one, handing him the deeds the summer before she died.

The summer before high school our language would change when the dusk drifted into our blood.

The morning of the company president’s Christmas party, my wife Christine read me a story from the newspaper about a woman found hiding in a neighbor’s bedroom closet.

1. At twilight, driving Route 8, my father refused the headlights, saving, he said, the bulbs. Three lanes, that road, passing a dare. 

The first thing his mother does when, unannounced, he walks inside her house is put down her phone and look him up and down as if his first semester of college has lasted five years.

When I climbed into Charley Burchfield’s car, he said he had a surprise for me, something that had to be done right now, June, 1968, because he’d just enlisted in the Marines.

Miss Hartung’s desk was in the back of the room so she could keep an eye on us.