Excerpt from A Jello Horse by Matthew Simmons

Upstairs, one of the housemates has a pinball machine. DEV finds the pinball machine, and goes to get you. He brings you upstairs to the pinball machine, and drops you off with the housemate. DEV is like your mother, leaving you at the arcade with a five dollar bill, so she can go buy shoes from a shoe store in the mall.
    The housemate says that cable television costs a person $30 a month. Renting a pinball machine costs him $20. He gets to choose a new machine every month.
    This month, it is Attack From Mars, which has a long open center up the playfield—no bumpers. Ramps, targets, and kickers are all on the sides. It is one of your favorite machines.

    You don’t play pinball with just your fingers like a person who doesn’t play much pinball. You use your body. You have played a lot of pinball. When you play, you stand on your right foot, which you plant against the machine’s front right leg. You rarely set your left foot down, and you spin at your hips. The raised leg adds a little extra torque to your body when you give the machine your hip. You are very careful not to slam tilt the machine with a hard check to the front panel. You hit with force and finesse. You modulate the pressure. You balance between violence and consolation.
    You dated a girl who liked to stand behind you when you played pinball. She held on to your hips and pressed herself against your back. You didn’t ever dance with her, but you played pinball and she held you and it was kind of like dancing. If you hip-checked the machine and she got bumped, you apologized and she told you you didn’t need to apologize. She told you to pretend she was not even there.

    You play pinball with the housemate, and you remain stone sober because you are the one who is driving everybody home when they want to leave the house party.
    You and the housemate talk about roadside attractions. You mention something you’ve read about, a place called Carhenge in Alliance, Nebraska, where a man has taken old cars and built his own version of Stonehenge with them. Yeah, built the housemate says. You don’t understand the way he inflected the word built, so you ask him what he meant. In Toadstool Geologic Park, says the housemate, they have a naturally occurring Carhenge. That guy stole the idea, the housemate says, from a real thing. You ask him what in the hell he is talking about, naturally occurring. A tornado, the housemate says, one of those big, big ones hit a junkyard in Omaha, and carried a bunch of fucking cars across the state, threw them up into the jet stream and they booked across the state, and landed in Toadstool in the shape of Stonehenge.
    I shit you not, the housemate says.
    It is absolutely fucking true, the housemate says.

    Then the housemate says, did you know that trailer parks are hit so often by tornadoes because of the shape? The way they are set up? I went to a math camp in high school, and this engineering teacher told me that tornadoes hit trailer parks because of the way they are set up. It attracts them. Scientists know how to prevent that from happening, the housemate says. That’s why tornadoes don’t ever hit airports, because scientists have told the people who design airports how to build them so they don’t attract tornadoes.

    You half listen, but mostly you hit corner shots, and trap the silver balls on your flippers during multi-balls, hit the Martians when your told, and fire shots right up the center at the plastic UFO to blow the Martian’s out of the sky when they attack.