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Flesh developing we're got slow played by some grinning Chinese maniac that he felt the pinch of genuine rage in even these hands offered a certain maze acoustic pleasure of mortification that was swift and public. It was an inconvenient arrangement tawdry from certain angles but couldn't help himself. The moment he spotted the dismal pink stucco of the casino's facade the see a bent cigarettes rising from the giant ashtray under the awning. He felt a squirt of brainless adrenaline. He had become addicted to the garlic and ginger prawns to a dish so rich richly infiltrated with NSG that it made his tongue go numb. I see you've had those good. Sometimes toward the end of a session having made his having made his third and final promise to cash in after the next hand would sit back and let the sensations wash over him. The clack of the power tiles being stirred. The nimble flicking of the cars the confusion of colognes and nicotine the monstrous lonely twitch of the place he loved artichoke Joes especially while hating it.

One more little section here. One day I arrived home to find Sharon waiting in his den. She pulled out a green eyeshade in a deck of cards and began dealing them onto his oriental rug. She done theatre in college. How long have you known. Said Sharon frowned. Jacob age eleven had tipped her off the little shit. He hacked into your computer. Sharon said I didn't hack into anything. Jacob yelled from the hallway I just clicked on the history tab bar for like one second. Sharon began speaking in her calm social worker tone glared glanced at the scattered cards a cluster of four hearts queen high and thought of his henpecked father. You could have told me Sharon said. I would have understood. He didn't want his wife's understanding. He had enough of that already. He wanted her indignation her censure the stain of his moral insufficiencies tossed between them like a bat. But she saw his

duplicity and raised her forgiveness. So he bid artichoke Joe's Farewell farewell green felt farewell Ginger prawns and began playing in a weekly game with fellow analysts. The twenty dollar buy in the nonalcoholic beer the arthritic dithering over a 75 cent raise. It was his penance. Overall he felt himself vaguely improved. He began to hike the Stanford hills and re read Dostoevsky and brought Sharon to the Swiss Alps for a month. His elder son Ike insisted on calling him Sisko it being his impression that the Cisco Kid had been a famous gambler. Jacob continued to sneak into his office in the hopes of catching him playing online check it before you wreck it Daddy-O. He warned us wanted very much to strike the boy just once near the eye. Thank you.

OK and BRENDAN MATHEWS stories have to be the two longest titles in the book. My last attempt to explain to you what happened with the lion tamer. Thank you. I want to say thanks A huge thanks to Heidi and to record for including me in the collection. Rick mentioned that there are plenty of writers out there you've never heard of and I count myself among them. He wasn't even a good lion tamer. Not before you showed up. He always looked the part with his whip in his chair and his spangled pants. But honestly watching him in the cage with those lions was like watching a man stagger blindfolded across a four lane highway. One night in Glens Falls the chair slipped from his hand and a cat swatted it around the cage like a chew toy in Council Bluffs the claw snapped his patent leather bandolier like an old shoe string and in Granite City a Lion caught the whip between its jaws and yanked him around the ring like a fish on a line. It was a minor miracle

every time he stepped out of the cage bruised and bleeding but still intact. He didn't seem to care that the clapping was never the thunderous peal you'd expect when a man emerged from a cage full of beasts. And he didn't care that petered out before half a minute was up. He just stand there with his arms raised like some avatar of victory and he'd beam that ivory smile and shake his blond mane. You'd think the Lions just elected him the king of the Serengeti. Looking at the scars in the shredded outfits with their missing sequins in their webs of quick crooked stitching I wonder why the guy was doing this to himself. You told me once that his father was a lion tamer and that these things run in the family. I don't know.