Most discussed stories

Interview

42454245 views2020 comments1414 favs

The ethnographer turns on a recorder. The story began before but that is lost, like it never happened.

My Son Thinks He's French

40414041 views2020 comments99 favs

My son thinks he's French.His accent was cute at first, but it's starting to get on my nerves. If he asks for another glass of Beaujolais I'm gonna go to jail for child abuse.Yesterday, I walked upstairs to make him turn his new Jacques Brel album down and I swear it…

I Remember Kitty D.

18871887 views2020 comments1111 favs

When the car arrived, Kitty bounded out, lipstick-stained cigarette dangling, silver hair tightly teased. We could not escape her hug, smelling of peppermint and Aqua-Net and Jean Nate.

Still Life in a Bowl

20762076 views2020 comments1313 favs

I sprinkle seaweed over the water and all twelve rise to feed. Two of them went down the hole but knew to come up. A toilet has mouths and caverns, not a bad place at all for fish.

Mercury Unbound - 4

19981998 views2020 comments88 favs

The music, Antonín Dvořák's 'New World Symphony,' the second movement, 'Largo,' immediately alters my mood.

Morning

18961896 views2020 comments99 favs

Leaves dance their way down,unfazed by this September heat. Bus stop routines set already-summer ended years ago.A chipmunk scampers undera parked truck while once againthe young man does his morning…

Four Thousand Dollars from Baghdad

26032603 views2020 comments33 favs

“This is the most dangerous road in the world and you want to drive down it. You crazy,” he said.

Postcard

23712371 views2020 comments1313 favs

A tiny story, 55 words, just enough to fit on a . . .

Zoo Story

30573057 views2020 comments1515 favs

I tell my friend, the animal lover, not to get too near the panther's cage. "Why not?" she asks. "You'll see," I say.

Slight of Hand

17261726 views2020 comments1212 favs

Our ironies don’t make us happy

The Mirror Tires of Looking at Itself

19461946 views1919 comments1414 favs

Sure, to a teacher, life is a paper / but what would life be to a druggist?

Wish I Had

676676 views1919 comments1818 favs

A pet scorpion. A pet scorpion named Chris.(1)

Gas Making You Sick?

50815081 views1919 comments1212 favs

It was a sore molar that was giving me trouble, on the bottom right. The dentist, about whose adulterous affairs everybody in the neighborhood knew and whispered about, ts-ts-ts'ed me and murmured "decay" before pulling out the drill.

Solzhenitsyn Juke-Box

27842784 views1919 comments1111 favs

My handwriting, slow in coming over many years, is good for lists, but I don't want to read sentences or write in it. Amber is on a list I wrote of things I want to remember of Russia: Rasputin's death and Peter the Great (6'7”). One of my lists I read as a poem in…

When a Bowl Hits a Tree

21302130 views1919 comments88 favs

You would think when a bowl hits a tree the sound would be fierce, a loud clatter as stoneware explodes on birch bark dispersing shards in daffodils and grape muscari, but the noise is gentle, a thudding clink like empty bourbon bottles rattling hollow in…

Moving Day

62156215 views1919 comments2222 favs

I didn’t hear that Duncan Pratt had been killed until I’d been out of the Army for two weeks and had gone four days without a single thought about that final year in Vietnam.

Restaurant Rondo

17271727 views1919 comments1414 favs

Before she flushes the toilet the world is spinning.

Desilu, Three Cameras

35253525 views1919 comments1212 favs

Ricky imagines bending her over his conga, yanking that bushy dark ponytail like reins and ripping into her. He sits, watches, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He needs a dancer for the Jezebel number now that Connie is showing. This girl would make a f

Texas Weather

17661766 views1919 comments99 favs

I know this: the sky is vast here// and the sun unforgiving/ to any architecture not the best

Dunes

28682868 views1919 comments1212 favs

I went out through another cold still morning erasing my steps behind me not because I did not want to be followed but because I did not want to find my way back again.

jewels

13271327 views1919 comments99 favs

it is said to make your manliness last forever

Snapshots

22722272 views1919 comments1717 favs

Jake remembers that Amy told him once that she thought that somehow he would always be a part of her life. That was before she went to Spain and married an American bull fighter.

Subj: re: doing time ...

19181918 views1919 comments1010 favs

The jail, where I stayed for 48 hours, gave me enough information to write a 180-page book, something I resisted setting out upon due to the insult of it.

Baby Love

49874987 views1919 comments1313 favs

She wanted one, she said. She wanted one who looked like me. I wanted one, because I wanted her. I wanted her for everything; I wanted her to fill every crack and space inside of me.

Lost Love Poem

44314431 views1919 comments1313 favs

Was that the door slamming?

Girl With Glasses And Skinny Fingers

17081708 views1919 comments1111 favs

Girl with glasses and skinny fingers playing with wires

Apologia

17701770 views1919 comments1313 favs

A short snippet of text

The bridge

21622162 views1919 comments1515 favs

as long as you have some snacks up there I can be brave

The King Provides

22262226 views1919 comments1515 favs

Our sons do nothing but drink and roar

Strobe Genre, Utah!

24742474 views1919 comments1414 favs

Co-polar order spectrum; strobe genre (the disco light of the 70s illumining and eclipsing fiction-non-fiction-non in one "article"); UTAH! a jump from forehead-down to standing fast, a cheer, for genre studies.