It doesn’t seem so long ago I hated that dog with all my heart.

I was just back from the war, about two months, still feeling like I was cleaning sand out of my private parts, if you know what I mean. I also had the bum ear and the bum leg from the war. So all in all I was feeling pretty useless to my family. We were in a tight spot, with Dad long gone, my brother Jorge deep into the meth, my sisters married off and living back in Mexico, and with a tiny sheep ranch that pretty much had no sheep. Well, there we had the two left. Ma tried to hold our family together. She kept saying the Sun always had to shine again sometime. But I could see in her eyes that things looked bad even to her. (more…)

“Look at that psychotic monkey.”

I glanced up from where I sat, sprawled across the top of a mossy flat boulder that was once a temple pillar, and looked in the direction Roy was turned. I moved with languid care; there was a viper coiled in a patch of warm Cambodian sunlight next to my steel-toed boot, and since I didn’t know what sort of snake he was, I thought it would be better not to offend him. There were things in the jungle much scarier than a basking snake, but a snakebite thousands of miles from MTV-watching civilization would be no picnic, either. (more…)