The Disappearing Man

A man walks across a room, then disappears. Two owls in the trees

open their eyes in the snowy night. Eight party balloons are stolen

from a card shop by a night thief who couldn't open the cash

drawer. While getting dressed, a woman discovers her bra size has

grown smaller. A man and a woman, attending their thirtieth high

school reunion, reminisce about their romance as teenagers,

promise to stay in touch, but never seen each other again. A man

travels to Idaho and his family never hears from him again. A

tomato plant withers and dies on a house porch in San Antonio.

Three raccoons are the latest road kill an environmentalist finds on

the highway. He gets out of his car and carries their remains into

the trees. A UFO hovers over a Southwest desert but there is no

human to see it. A baby farts in her crib and understands the pink

ceiling above her for the first time. The flugelhorn player in the

orchestra has a wet dream the night after the great concert. The

trail of ants leads to a spilled plate of spaghetti on the kitchen floor.

The last shaman in the Blackfoot nation pokes a knife through his

drum and dies at the age of 102. A peanut butter sandwich is

topped off with ketchup and potato chips under the second slice of

bread. The river changes course before any historians are born to

write about it. A high school football team loses its seventh game

in a row and nine of the starting players have sex with their girl

friends that night. A divorced couple run into each other at the

grocery store and tears come to their eyes, but no words. A man

walks across a room and disappears. An abandoned car with an

empty gas tank blocks traffic for fortyfive minutes on a freeway

ramp. 4,812 Internet websites are destroyed by a virus on the same

day 5,438 porno sites go up. The priest baptizing the baby boy

fantasizes about his own mother holding him, but no one knows

about what the old priest did to the father of the baby twenty years

ago. A time capsule remains buried in an old building after the

entire block is destroyed by an earthquake. The makeup on the

drugged actor's face begins to melt under the lights. A boy sprays

his mother's pet canary with aftershave and the bird dies two hours

later. A woman looks at herself in the mirror and sees her mother's

face. A girl touches her new boyfriend for the first time. The

president of the country doesn't sleep that night because he made a

horrible decision earlier in the day. The department store runs out

of Barbie dolls for two days before the next shipment arrives. A

famous rock star embeds a needle in his left ear, bleeds for a while,

then composes his next hit song. Between the fourteen villages

destroyed in the war, fortytwo stray dogs wander aimlessly

picking at human remains. A road atlas contains a minor, twolane

highway that doesn't exist, but the driver who follows the map

finds a ghost town in the mountains. The boat sinks in the chilly

lake and both father and son swim out, their five big Walleye fish

lost in the accident, several years passing before the two of them

speak to each other again. A boy dreams about being chased by a

band of chimpanzees dressed in red shorts and suspenders, then

wakes in the morning and turns his computer on. An old woman,

age 96, recites her last Hail Mary and Our Father before dying in

bed at 1:14 on a Thursday morning at her daughter's house. There

is a crack in the foundation of the newly built house, but the

owners won't discover it for two years. The snow finally melts and

a soda can from the previous summer is uncovered under the small

magnolia bush. A letter from a distant cousin arrives in the mail

and the woman tries to call her on the phone but gets a busy signal

all day. A man walks across a room, then disappears. There is one

window open in that room and the wasp that clings to it leaves a

tiny black dot on the wire screen when it buzzes away.