Most read stories

Summer Reading

19661966 views55 comments33 favs

The summer everyone read Faulkner, I read Hemingway. Out of spite.

Phil's Last Stand

19661966 views11 comment22 favs

Phil was scared. Not of his own shadow, but of the three men from ConAgra who'd dropped a duffel bag of green outside his den the week before.

THE WEDDING

19661966 views66 comments33 favs

I am at a wedding with a new girlfriend. The bride is her old college roommate. I don't really know anyone else here. The wedding is being held at a huge estate, located on the edge of enormous cliffs that overlook the ocean. Despite the danger of this precarious…

Exasperation Management

19651965 views1313 comments1313 favs

We honor fierce, quick, cunning/ thought-in-action types

How to Forget

19651965 views44 comments11 fav

Refuse to go to the church service, even though you already missed the funeral. Tell his mother something came up. Call his phone over and over, just to hear his voice, until his mother asks you to stop. Make a recording of his voicemail. Delete it an

Better Days

19651965 views66 comments55 favs

I peeled off a hundred. For the screwdriver, I said. The kid shook his head, made a pushing-away gesture. You need it worse’n I do right now, he said.

Tortoise

19651965 views00 comments00 favs

Seven black and orange Tortoise-shell kittens nursed in a crate the day Sue returned from rehab, to her parent's Atlanta home.

Apology + Opportunity

19651965 views44 comments11 fav

What I need to secure from you now are two swears on this copy of Camp Bylaws for the Hearty and True that you won’t let my misinformed intrusion dampen your beginnings.

The Crescent Caretaker

19651965 views22 comments11 fav

Enter Tipitina’s – the rotation hole where electric, shoeless uncles allocate their copper goulashes to catch white dripwater.

His Laugh is My Yellow (or explaining skin color to a six-year-old boy)

19651965 views55 comments44 favs

Max is the color of burnt caramelized sugar the sweet crust that decorates our bright enameled pots.

Tribal Elder

19641964 views22 comments11 fav

"Look at this," she says while thumbing through the guide book, "look at what we can do on Jooga Booga island. Says here, 'Parasailing over the sapphire blue sea, one soars hundred of feet above water-skiers, boaters, and snorkelers, and the picture is b

My Wife, My Love

19641964 views2121 comments1818 favs

When I died, she said, she was going to have me cremated and put my ashes in the cats’ litter box.

Three short-shorts

19641964 views1212 comments99 favs

Wake up! But it was already too late for Charles.

Relativity

19631963 views00 comments00 favs

It seems every time we get together, Seiko is there. She just started working in Keiko's department and now they're always together. I think Keiko feels responsible for Seiko. Like if Seiko's not getting any, it's bad manners for Keiko to do it.

Men Respond to Women's Tennis Grunts With Armpit Farts

19631963 views00 comments00 favs

An armpit fart is a simulated sound of flatulence produced by creating a pocket of air between the armpit of a partially raised arm and the hand, then swiftly closing this pocket by bringing the arm close to the torso.

They Would Judge His Trespasses

19631963 views77 comments22 favs

They waited until the crowd was gone before making their move. Gill kept watch while Warren bypassed the lock. “You sure about this?” Gill whispered. Voices echoed down the hall of the museum.

The Burning Gulf

19631963 views88 comments44 favs

None of us ever thought this would happen.

Anchored Leaves

19631963 views1111 comments55 favs

i.More and more, for Megan LeMaster, each beginning was its own end. She couldn't bear to buy flowers or dresses that seemed too beautiful. Friendships formed, endured, gave out in a handshake. Each deed in life had an immediate, inescapable…

George, Love, Shakespeare and Company

19631963 views88 comments66 favs

"Love, against the dying of the light." (An unusual story about George Whitman, former owner of the revered & beloved Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, France.)

MONSOON

19631963 views55 comments33 favs

a beautiful cool quiet day

A Marriage of Bodies

19621962 views11 comment11 fav

In sleep their bodies drift between the sheets until they find each other.

Touching Jim

19621962 views1313 comments1212 favs

He introduced me to key lime pie, and for this alone I would have loved him forever. It was an innocent time for me, and I was easy to please.

WE NEVER

19621962 views00 comments00 favs

No news spreads faster than news of a death. Word of the death of a child can be heard simultaneously in a thousand places. . . the word spread by telephone, in back yards from clothesline to clothesline, with whispers in grocery stores, in the looks on faces stunned into…

Out of Uniform

19621962 views44 comments55 favs

Between the wars, I hung around in an air-conditioned room. It was tiny, and I was shoved to the back, but after living outside on another man's back for months of bullets and bombs, I welcomed the stuffiness. White paint kept close walls from reminding me of the trenches'…

Break-up Bars (A Recipe...)

19621962 views00 comments00 favs

2 sticks soft (like your heart) butter... ... 1 cup crushed (like you) walnuts...

The Forefinger of Lenin

19621962 views1010 comments44 favs

Who puts Vaseline on the forefinger of Lenin? I want to know

Stupid's Rising Up

19611961 views99 comments11 fav

Stupid's rising up, I see. Melting all the intellect. I before E, except after C, but that's not how the alphabet goes.

Discuss

19611961 views33 comments22 favs

... her hair spills like spinach all the way down to her backpack, the top pocket where the bowl and the cinnamon estrange themselves from the coffee.

Poems Are Scary Things

19611961 views2323 comments1616 favs

They will take you, naked, and put their tongues and fingers into intimate, erogenous openings

Rock-a-Hoola

19611961 views1111 comments55 favs

She wears a green and pink bikini and walks real slow, poking her chest out so people will notice her.