A man living alone in the country, Phillip, is disturbed from his listless, sad existence by the bite of an exotic looking beetle in his living room. The offense fires up his dormant angel. He plugs up the hole the beetle scrambled into,  then goes down to the highway tavern

Phil is a quasi-underworld businessman of 35. When his mistress dies under shady circumstances and his wife consequently threatens to divorce him, Phil is overwhelmed with regrets and doubts. He flees everything to visit Charlie, a gentle philosopher/crackpot he roomed with in college but has not communicated with

A middle-aged man clings to a narrow ridge of stone as lightning whipcracks in the dark air around him. “I’m fucked!” he laughs. The storm past, he totters along the ridge to finish his mission: rescuing an injured young man stranded atop the mountain peak.  “I can’t

We follow a young writer who is learning craft and wisdom of good fiction writing. All week he agonizes over his manuscript in order to make the final Friday afternoon pickup at  the mailbox near his apartment. Every Monday morning he receives the manuscript back in the mail, marked up

The house is a jumble. Dirty plates and food packaging everywhere. Little heaps of floor sweepings  along the perimeters. The window sills are old battlefields of insect carcasses and sagging spider webs. But a Barney Kessel record is playing. There’s a glass of red wine. The smoke of a