We all make meaning in the ways we need to.

He couldn’t say whether he’d done the right thing or not. He supposed it didn’t matter. We all make meaning in the ways we need to. Whatever he told the girl, she would fold it into a narrative that worked until it didn’t any more, and then she’d be grown up. It happened to everyone.

POTHOLE GOBLINS BY GREG NOVEMBER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 95

These days Tim walked a stretch of old road behind Furniture City instead of the shorter way along the new main drag out front, two lanes each direction, landscaped median populated with colorful composite sculptures meant to evoke the shore 30 miles away. The old road (sandy, weedy rambler that it was) let him walk alone, in quiet, which suited his aching head and overall fatigue. While the new boulevard thundered away, on the old road the noise was dampened by the furniture warehouse and a stretch of woodsy overgrowth still harboring workers’ detritus from an 18-month project “updating” three miles of the centenarian Old Albany Highway. Some …