Book excerpt: Strolling like a possum through neighborhood yards, Sherrie Flick takes it all in: the paperboy seduced over a glass of milk; the dinner prepared for a dead man; the boy on the foyer floor considering a spray of yellow paint. In Whiskey, Etc., it's the particulars that draw you closer-the stained coffee cups, curled-up dogs, wood-burning stoves and canoes snug in their sheds-to a muddled loneliness housed behind crystalline windows. To follow Flick's cowboy-possum saunter across these dazzling short (short) stories is to visit life, desperate and languid and dolefully funny, where it happens.