Alphabetical stories

Am I Anna Karenina?

21932193 views99 comments33 favs

You’re often photographed at Martha’s Vineyard at sunrise, Key West on New Year’s Day, Coney Island on Christmas, and variously at dive bars in Montauk. You’re a woman of a certain age and you are also a woman of the world. You’re a 21st century

am I still alive, yes

774774 views33 comments11 fav

She read her briefs as she sat at the café table in her smart dark blue suit, and she altered the wording on the briefs in front of her, and she would check the watch at her wrist as if there were a pulse there: Am I still alive, yes. Am I still alive,

Amalfi

763763 views00 comments00 favs

He reaches towards the single, tall glass on the table between them and picks it up; ice cubes chatter merrily. He takes a sip and smiles.

Amanda Palmer

12571257 views33 comments33 favs

Amanda Palmer's explaining the eyebrow thing. An altercation with someone at Roadrunner, or maybe old boyfriend shit to burn— She's animated but he's losing signal, filling in the blanks himself. Whatever, it won't light at first, and then WHUMP and she…

amaryllis

11281128 views44 comments11 fav

On such warm nights when wet sex happens suddenly, please, remember the amaryllis. How they’ll push up out of the ground in August after the first real heat opens the air. I too was born in such weather. Balmy nights when heat lightning beats in the

Amateur Theory of the Universe

11661166 views1111 comments33 favs

this could be true

Ambassador of Nowhere

10871087 views66 comments55 favs

Before you tripped on the third rail, you were like any other: coat a shard of midnight-blue, eyes filled with gratitude but for nothing. You were a lost coyote on a snowy hill. With sad magnificence you wandered, terrorizing passengers who secretly wished to pat your…

Amber

15571557 views99 comments77 favs

I am the marigold wheel no one can understand, the menace your grandfather warned you about. Yes, yes, that last phrase was overkill...

Ambient

872872 views00 comments00 favs

I try to make conversation by showing her the washing instructions for the jeans I just bought for $375.00. She reads slowly. “What, do they assume you live in Australia or something?”

Ambitious

13231323 views44 comments22 favs

Why do men become explorers? he asked. Because they want to cannibalize the unknown; to leave the chemicals, the furniture (and, yes, the shrew) behind; to make their way hi ho into the brush, whose weeds and lianas remain empty of the exhortations of Jesus Christ, whose…

Ambivalence

10891089 views22 comments11 fav

She said it feels wrong. Too wet, she said. I snickered, she smacked.

Amble

947947 views11 comment22 favs

I sulk across the room to feed you,hold your hand, tell you everything will be fine. It is the right time of night,the light from the street falls onto the chairat the perfect angle. I look at you, gray, shimmering, persnickety. Don't move, thisis just the dust, helping me…

Ambulance

45344534 views3030 comments3333 favs

Once you start telling the truth it's hard to quit. You look around and reasons are everywhere. It's like a new appliance, truth-telling, a can opener that's so good you barely have to turn it.On the phone my sister asks me why I don't come out and see her in San…

Amelia

14661466 views99 comments66 favs

Every time she tries to sleep they come; legions of small armored things scuttle claws aloft across the purple sand as soon as she stops moving.

Amen, Hallelujah

12311231 views44 comments11 fav

"Now, here daddy was on the back porch at night talking with some man about leaving."

Amends

153153 views1414 comments1111 favs

We met in graduate school. We were both taking a course on teaching using the case study method over at the Business School. I was from psychology. She was from biology. We were both getting Harvard doctorates. But as many people…

Amends '82: Part One

19501950 views00 comments00 favs

The kitchen I snuck out of seventeen years before kept fading to black and white, with this layer of something between me and them.

Amends '82: Part Two

12711271 views00 comments00 favs

Bobby took one out and looked at the date. "July 1965. Does that mean anything to you, Ma? Carla, T.J.?" Bobby handed the paper to my mother. "Why don't you spread it out on the counter to see if you can find something that he might have wanted…

America From The Outside

17891789 views1111 comments55 favs

You aren’t easy to explain, you Americans.

American Birthdays

16031603 views1111 comments99 favs

Cherry was America's least favorite pie. Her mother made it every year for her father's birthday because "daddy doesn't like cake." America had to wash the bowls, the wooden spoon, the plates and finally the Pyrex dish. Her brother got to "contribute" by climbing the tree…

American Passage

10491049 views66 comments66 favs

The moon, a cataract cloaked in its charcoal fog, slowly seeps among the trees; night's unguent.Its glance is constant and white,its arc known. I watch its brow of bone with constant wonder.The long, slow funeral of America is taking its time; its…

American Soul

932932 views22 comments11 fav

At one time it appeared that Everyone was walking their own angel On a leash, but Now we're not that sure at all And it could come out in song That it might really be the angels Who’ve been walking us All along All this broken glass

American Triptych

13951395 views1010 comments66 favs

It’s always fun and easy/ to punish the poor

Amiaivel

14091409 views00 comments00 favs

Once upon a time a queen was blessed with twin sons, which she named Nosch and Amiaivel.

Amish in the Theater of Lust

10061006 views1414 comments77 favs

Through the Walmart parking lot they came...

Amma

827827 views22 comments00 favs

God love him, she used to say. you never noticed it much at the time because it is just something like a habit. a benevolent habit. around through the years and decades she went like that. God love him, she used to say, if she saw someone resting peacefully, of if…

Amoco Cadiz

16801680 views1414 comments1111 favs

She'd liked the name of the tanker. The Amoco Cadiz.

among American gods

475475 views33 comments22 favs

in dark recesses of this morgue of earth / where beauty of the good does not compel, / where evil's horrors seldom do repel— / Americ gods reign o'er from birth to birth.

Among the Missing: Family and War

667667 views77 comments44 favs

As Sebald says, I grew up in the shadow of war....

Among the Young Aesthetes

593593 views00 comments00 favs

I found him on the internet the other day, His air laconic, the beard now ashen grey.