The pole was tugged.
    The boy sat on a short pier, a body’s distance from where the Gulf of Mexico tickled the fingernail-clipping of a Florida island.  His feet swung like pendulums over the edge, tiny grits of sand flying off with each oscillation.  The string from his fishing pole disappeared into the ocean like spittle hitting a Coca Cola bottle.  His arms and knees blushed violently.
    He did not like to fish.  He did not like anything anything about fish or any type of seafood.  He had been moved from the cod of Rockport, Massachusetts to the flounder off of Indian Rocks Beach, a journey that only served to change the smell from a foggy mustiness to one of floweriness, but still overwhelmed by the stink of fish.  His mother angered when he refused to eat lobster--he watched her with disgust, imagining severed limbs dipped in urine. 
    Yet here he was, with this pole.  And there was a tug.
    What he pulled out was no snapper, spasming like a live wire, but instead was mass, substance, a solid block of silent gray anger.  It had a demon’s tail, a mouth like a slit throat.  The boy knew he had to release this creature; otherwise, there would be no telling what horrors it would subject him to.  He could think of no course of action that would not get him within contact of the creature, that would not allow it to consume him within its bulk. 
    He heard footsteps behind him.
    “Wow, you caught a stingray,” his aunt said.

    Cory and Scott sat in the room, a table carcass-filled with empty bottles between them.  There had been roughly a dozen people in the room, but it slowly dwindled to just the two, as others went to their own rooms.  This was Cory’s room, filled with military angles and brownness.  Scott was a single parent, so he lived in housing roughly a mile away.  His child was with his parents for the summer, so he was relishing his irresponsibility.  Scott could not drive home, so he was going to sleep in Cory’s room, where there was a bunk bed, although the base had been letting airmen have rooms to themselves for years.  Cory said something about Scott being on top, and Scott blurredly said something about being so drunk he didn’t know if Cory was coming onto him.  Cory said, I could be, and after a moment they both laughed and went to sleep.
    That was a time of new policies, and it seemed like they spent more time in meetings and training than actually working.  Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  New safety policies.  Suicide prevention.  Statistics entombed them meaninglessly.
    By September of 1996, Cory had left the Air Force and moved to North Dakota, where his parents lived.  Scott reenlisted and was preparing to move to his next assignment in Nebraska.  On the second day of the month, a friend of Cory’s, who Scott still worked with, told him Cory’s mother had called him and told him Cory had committed suicide.  The only thing in the note that made any sense was that it was because “of what happened in Europe.”

    This is what he remembered of his grandfather’s death.
    His grandfather is the first dead body he has seen up close.  His grandfather is pale, like settled milk.  His grandfather was a burly man, and he can see the gut, but it does not move.  The first of his grandfather he sees as he approaches the casket is the nose, a crooked arch that had lost the Frenchman’s love of alcohol it usually expressed. 
    There was a patch of blackness, erased tape, and then he remembered sitting in the pews next to his cousin Eric, and the priest walked zigzaggedly toward them, resting a comforting hand here, giving a consoling nod there.  His collar seemed to pulse like a heartbeat against the blackness of his shirt.  He bent to the two boys and asked, “Did you love your grandfather?”  The boy squeaked nothingness, sure any answer would doom him.  He burst into tears, although his cheeks had been dry since learning of his grandfather's death.
    He cried for two hours.  Ten minutes were for his grandfather, one hour for himself, the rest because he felt it was expected.
    This is what he remembered of his grandfather’s life: angry shouts at the boy’s mother for staying with an abusive boyfriend; the gurgling red death of a slaughtered pig near his grandfather’s barn; horse testicles hanging off a barbwire fence like a sad rearview mirror ornament.
    Time swallowed all else.   

    Highway 71 ran along the spine of Kansas.  The sky was the color of coal strained with cotton.  Snow clung to the shoulders like a lazy pet.  The father peered through the window, frost caught on the corners, as the daughter slept in the back seat, a twisted L interested at the seat belt.  Music whispered in the car.  A box of compilation tapes were on the passenger seat.
    The tow truck moved like a serpent off the median.  The father moved over to the shoulder to avoid it, catching some black ice.  The car went over the side, hitting rocks and ground.  The brakes had no effect, and the car descended with flattened tires.
     Well, this is it, the father thought calmly.  Time had quickened, and he saw the paramedics taking his mangled body out of the car.
    The car hit a large rock, which bent part of the bumper.  His seat belt caught against his chest.  The car stopped.
    “Dad, are we there yet?” a voice whispered sleepily from the back seat.

    They walked along the south rim of the Grand Canyon.  They would have liked to go into the Canyon, to hike or ride a mule, but the itinerary only allowed for a few hours before the moved onto the next destination on their trip. 
    Robyn’s feet were sore.  They both wore hiking boots, but her shoes were new, and she had already walked around the entirety of the meteor crater.  Her dad took a picture of her next to a sign that warned of the possibilities of falling. 
    Suddenly, her dad’s foot scooted along a rock.  His body spun like that of a drunken ballerina.  His body moved toward the rim’s edge, and he reached out to grab a branch.  He looked down the side of the canyon for a moment, and then turned to her and asked if she was ready to go on.
    Years later, he insisted that it was her, not him, who had almost fallen.

    In the air there is more air.  It is a kiss with space travel not understood any more than drowning in the womb.  This memory belongs to another, stolen like a penny from a dresser.  She is young, her teenage years lost as the decade closed on the Beatles, Kennedy, and Woodstock.  She is entombed in the girth of the plane.  She looks out the window and sees cottony clouds sliced through by the plane’s wings.  A pudgy infant is in her lap, plastic glasses swallowing his face, his diaper peeking out the top of his pants.
    That baby is me.  That is my mother.   
    In this thief’s pretty, she can be seen, dew on her lip, a gulp in her throat.  Stark freckles stand on the smoothness of her nose.  She will never like flying.  Does she hold baby too tightly?  Too loosely?  He is in the mist of her arms, and then he is not.  The plane falls in a pocket of air, and the baby is out of her arms tossed forward several rows.  The woman screams.  A man reaches out, stiff business-shirt arms pushing woolen sleeves.  The baby is brought down and stares at the man’s face.  Plastic crunches under a cart’s wheel.