THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving    p.122
A rock chased me from the back yard into the pantry when I was ten years old. I tried to destroy it with a baseball bat but it recited two acts of contrition in a British accent and slunk back out to the garden, lodging itself by the summer squash.
That night network TV had the movie starring Robin Williams playing. My old brother who had seen it on a friend’s Betamax mooned how there would be naked women or at least close to it. When Garp and his girlfriend were in the bushes, my brother asked me to go and get him Cheetoes. I obeyed and soon I heard him yelling how the British rock had returned and he locked me in for safety. When I finally broke out with Campbell soup cans I found him sitting in the lazy boy grinning. “You missed it.”
I promised I would revenge him by reading it and fifteen years later I delved in. The night I began chapter five I heard a radio report about a group of marauding serial killers who were roaming the country killing male college students and putting tiny smiley faces on their bodies. I wasn’t in college but I carried a book bag then. I used all of my summer paychecks to buy two guns. Then I quit my job, slept days and sat by the door all night, boxes of ammunition at my feet.

SOPHIE’S CHOICE by William Styron
1st attempt  p.298
For some reason my mother was obsessed with Irish history though she was German/Dutch. After she read about the English torture technique of pulling fingernails off with a wrench I was instructed to sit in the lazy boy while my brother and his three-hundred pound friend Marvin sat in my lap. Because I had visions of playing guitar I always left my fingernails long and mother readied a Sears socket wrench to the top of my index finger. They called me KidHulk for what I did. Mother never walked right again after Marvin broke both her legs following my throw.
My Film and Literature professor was Dutch—a fact he reminded us of every class: Well I’m Dutch, we do things differently and You know who lived around the block from where I grew up? Spinoza. He was tall and his wardrobe smelled of Dr. Bruner’s peppermint soap. This wide-shouldered man slept with an ungodly amount of his students, including men and two pet dogs. Everyone wanted to be in the memoir Knopf advanced him for. He never asked me to his bedroom and I had already slept with a Pulitzer Prize winning art history professor and a gorgeous Italian philosophy specialist from Naples with leopard pantyhose and a honey-colored BMW. This lynx had me write dramatic monologues about my nocturnal emissions. I stalled during Sophie’s German flashbacks but my extra credit assignment eventually netted a B+.

2nd attempt  p.299
There were many meals when our mother added crushed glass to the main dish. Dad’s dental was high but since my father always paid his son’s bills and my parents cut all their expenses in half, mom wanted to get the premiums out of the way so she could have some bridge work done.
Eventually Dad called his sister for revenge. Aunt Sydney, a wiry woman with a record number of hospitalizations for killing crows because she thought they were devils, held my brother and me hostage, ostensibly for mom’s chicken salad sandwich recipe. In an old country house she stuffed us into an attic with fiberglass and decomposed mice. Mom drove the Oldsmobile into the side and the entire place collapsed. The fiberglass broke our fall somewhat and we escaped with life long rashes on our arms.
A month after I began the novel, in one of the few periods when I didn’t cover the rashes with thin turtlenecks, I joined a gym. Because I read from the hardback version I carried two heavy duty clamps to attach to the treadmill. Just as I thought I might squeak through those Holocaust flashbacks one of the clamps fell off and landed on my foot. I was then thrown out a plate glass window since I had the thing set on ten miles an hour.
          A few guys released the security camera recording of the incident and I ended up on the Tonight Show via satellite from the intensive care unit. They had Meryl Streep call in with her regards.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES by Roberto Bolaño  p.128
When I was ten I asked my father to take me to the comic book store. It was on the bad side of town and he balked but my mother pulled a butcher knife—the signal for her wanting space. My brother didn’t like comic books so I hated that he came along. I asked the man behind the counter if they had the June issue of the Spectacular Spiderman.
          The man had a ponytail and smoked a cigarette. “Yeah, I got the new Spiderman here,” and he pointed at the Amazing Spiderman, the original.
          “No, no, they have a new one called the Spectacular Spiderman. It started in 1976. What you have there is the regular series.”
          He didn’t say anything for a while and I thought I might have to run a few blocks south to where dad and my brother were looking at the black hookers. Finally his lips curled down and he said, “If you come in the back and help me with the new load of GI Joes I’ll get you the Spectacular one.”
          “What a shithead you are,” I said immediately. “Didn’t you see that movie about Adam the missing kid last week? You think I’d trust you? You’re a hippy/pothead/junkie/cokehead probably.”
          His swift punch broke my front teeth but dad came back and used Charlene’s DDD bra to strangle him. We wiped up fingerprints for an hour.
          On the ride home my brother pointed at me, “You so don’t know how happy that thing between your legs gets. If you don’t ask to come to the comic book store next week I’ll kill you.”
          Salespeople at stores that sell print material have always given me trouble. Mindy, a Barnes and Noble woman with fifteen earrings, convinced me to get The Savage Detectives if I wanted a good time. After I bought it Mindy followed me to my car and started wiggling her tongue in my face. “What are you doing lady?”
          She knelt in front of me and furiously attacked my belt before I hoisted her up. “Do you think I want to be bothered by you now?” I bellowed. “You said I’d have a good time if I bought the book and now I’m going home to read it and get my jollies.”
          I could see why Mindy was obsessed with The Savage Detectives. All these kids are having sex and arguing about poetry. Yes, yes—Dead Poet’s Society in Mexico, plus real fornication. The following weekend my mother married her third husband Earl, who apparently owned a sugar cane plantation. I flew to Port-au-Prince just like everyone else. Or so the invitation said. When I came to the reception hall the maids wiping windows were bewildered. The hall was to host a funeral dinner tomorrow, that was all. I called my mother and she confirmed they were to get married today. In Denver. It was just that my brother and she didn’t want me around. “Enjoy Haiti darling,” she cried.
          I walked to the train station with The Savage Detectives in hand. The sun beat down relentlessly. I opened the book to the middle and set it face down on the gleaming rail of the high speed track. The derailment killed 67 people. If Bolaño had done more editing easily less than half that number would have perished.

Greg Gerke lives in Buffalo . His work has or will appear in Rosebud, Fourteen Hills, Pedestal Magazine, Pindeldyboz,, Flash Forward Press 2009 Anthology and others. There’s Something Wrong With Sven, a book of short fiction has been published by Blaze Vox Books. His website is www.greggerke.com