He sat with the body for a long time, thinking about his last move. After a while, he took the tattoo kit from his bag and sat at the table. He placed the items before him and rolled up his sleeves. He gazed at the tiny stars on each arm, counting them, recalling the deeds behind them. But there was no way to balance it.

I will endure martyrdom, Kojirō tells himself, before they hit him on the back of the head. This time the blow is strong, he even hears the bone in his skull creaking. Ah, if God were merciful I would die instantly! he still says, but no mercy comes to him from heaven as he rolls to the ground.

It’s the same with flag football. True fact: no one wants to be there. Not the players, not the coaches, not the refs—not even the women who sell mouth guards and water bottles at the games. The only people who believe in the whole painful exercise are the mothers in the stands, the women who want their sons to play football (because there’s some prestige in that) but don’t want them to get hurt. And the more they get into it, the more they cheer and cry out things like “Way to pull that flag, Taylor!” the more the boys on the field want to disappear.

The funny thing about the story is she got a flat tire on the way to school that morning, thought could my day get any worse?

The Cop-Watch Advocates demanded to know Zapata’s name, and filmed the suspect and his pool of blood with great enthusiasm. The suspect, though, was cleared by a medical team. Meanwhile, several of his victims began loudly telling their stories to the sergeant, which made for much less compelling cinematography.

They say ignorance is bliss.  Which means the less you know the happier you are.  It follows then that learning something new costs some happiness.  But people learn new things all the time so that means your whole life you become less happy.

The earth beneath our boots became a slippery soup of water and blood. Bodies stacked up four and five deep. We took to throwing corpses over the timberworks to make room for the fighting. Some of them bodies took so many musket balls they fell apart in your hands when you tried to heave them over.

When I got to 34th Street, I decided to go into Macy’s. I was thinking about the dead tooth. In time it would turn black. I walked past the rows of makeup counters and realized that I had no idea if I was pretty.  Growing up around Louise, her sisters and I learned that it didn’t matter if we were pretty – all that mattered was that we were not Louise. I stepped up to a lipstick display and found the matte brick-colored shade that everyone wore that year. In a business card-sized mirror on a counter display I watched as I dragged the matte brick color back and forth across my dry lips. I smiled, revealing the dead front tooth. It was like all the other teeth – white, luminous. I put the lipstick back in the display and walked out of the store, back out onto Broadway.

She locked the door and turned off the lights. Together, they moved bookcases in front of the door and piled books atop of them; book towers failed to cover the door’s slim glass window. Then they stacked chairs atop and in front of the bookcases, but they appeared flimsy.

They were up and away before they had time to think further. Mike held him by the armpits, but Patch’s breathing grew erratic and his cries were worse for being muffled. They staggered. Her boots dislodged rocks that cartwheeled and got faster as they fell toward the greens of the canopy which blurred the valley below. It looked as if she’d kidnapped and bludgeoned him. Patch was oblivious to all this, his eyes were shut so tight they might have been sewn. All that was left was to hustle him away from the scene of the crime and into a shallow grave. Who needed the Taliban when she took such care of him?