Kabira “Brittany” Rojas, 19, and Nikki Silas, 20, danced at Show World, shared an apartment, dreamed of making it big. Then they were murdered.

I met her in a San Francisco bar—a big, straw-blond girl with a baseball cap jerked backward on her head, wearing a flight jacket and red braces, her blue eyes lined in black. Looking like the girl who crashed the boys’ clubhouse. Liz B. is a white power skinhead, a recruiter for the American Front, a self-described “white supremacist feminist”—and the most self-assured 22-year-old I’ve ever met.

Guillermo just lies there. Collects his phlegm in little paper cups. He hardly gets out of bed and when he does, he often gets back in with his shoes on. He’s turning into a stick man and spooking all the guys in the Rikers Island AIDS ward.

When the painting is rolled out across the billboard, cheers and shouts erupt from the street below. “Ohhh, damn!” “Hell, yeah, man!” A woman bursts into tears. The artwork, 48-by-14 feet and hung above Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles, depicts a superhero-sized woman in a pink dress and combat boots beheading a man.

“Come, we will go out into the world,” the children say to each other in fairy tales. They fly away, deeper and deeper into the forest. And when they have gone a very long way, they come to a little house where no one lives. “We can live here,” they say. And they gather moss and leaves to make a bed; nuts and berries to eat.

Any crime you find in the big city you’ll find here in the Daniel Boone National Forest, but no big-city police officer gets the chance to deal with such a variety of offenses: assault, murder, rape, turkey-baiting, timber theft, drug trafficking, body-dumping, ginseng poaching, looting of archaeological sites, DUIs and off-road-vehicle violations, illegal camping, fishing and hunting out of season.

What’s the hardest thing about spending 40 years of your life behind bars? For one ex-con, it was finally getting out. Kathy Dobie tells the tale of a career criminal who missed prison so badly, he pulled a brazen reverse Shawshank—and damn near got away with it

AWOL, French Leave, the Grand Bounce, jumping ship, going over the hill—in every country, in every age, whenever and wherever there has been a military, there have been soldiers discharging themselves from the ranks.

As a young soldier in Vietnam, Cecil Ison saw something, something so horrific that he buried the memory of it for thirty years and swore he’d never allow it to surface again. Then, on March 20, 2003—the day after we started bombing Iraq—the past leapt up and grabbed him.

On Thursday, when I arrived in Bensonhurst, neighborhood people, cops, and reporters were milling on the cor­ner where, the previous evening, Yusef Hawkins had been shot and killed by a crowd of neighborhood boys.

Patty rests fitfully in a hallway, the plastic bag with her and her sister Michelle’s clothes nearby. “I hate it when she falls asleep,” Michelle says. “Everybody goes through our stuff.” Patty’s tired. Patty’s “sick.” “She can’t go out,” Michelle says. “I’m gonna have to do it all now. Help her through the night.”

As a child, I courted simplicity and goodness. I’d fill a soup bowl with water, add leaves from the hedge, and eat it with a doll’s spoon, slowly, until I was calm. The world was gorgeous and terrible-lightning, God, my father in a suit, the mere thought of my mother asleep … My passions disheveled me.