Most read stories

Middle Age

19861986 views1818 comments1414 favs

There are no city-chewed streets,/ only white and lilac blooming dogwood trees.

Circling '84

19861986 views33 comments33 favs

Other things are on my mind when the Tupperware lady says, "First, let's move your couch over by the door and the table here."

Biography

19851985 views1313 comments88 favs

There is a price. It's on the back. If you turn it around you'll see. It isn't expensive. Everything's okay.

This is Why We Can Never Have Nice Things

19851985 views66 comments55 favs

At age eleven, I murder the coffee table. I gouge with every available implement: thumbtacks, Lefty scissors, the plastic hand of my Barbie accomplice (who really should have known better). It is a slow death. In the end, there is nowhere to hide the body. When I am…

Prompts

19851985 views1616 comments1313 favs

Write a poem in which your father is a dog and you are his leash.

Anti

19851985 views99 comments55 favs

“What do you call this place?” I didn't really want to talk much in there. For some reason, talking felt too—linear. The words seemed to have a kind of reverberation into associations that seemed somewhat meaningless at the time.”

Summer Reading

19851985 views55 comments33 favs

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

Universal Theory #1: The 3-Step Secret to a Good Life

19851985 views66 comments22 favs

1. Think up problems that don’t exist 2. Realize, suddenly, that they don’t exist 3. Elation

Breakfast Dance - a 55 word story

19851985 views1414 comments66 favs

The handsome man at the opposite table swivels his head at the tall cool slim blonde entering the breakfast cafe. The ordinary woman sitting with him adjusts her chair accordingly. She pretends to ignore her husband's distraction, smoothes her hair, licks her…

Lethargy

19841984 views55 comments22 favs

‘Your hands are very clean’ she said to the furniture salesman. His name was Morrison. "After Jim" Morrison Pentworthy. His father specialized in Doors.

They Would Judge His Trespasses

19841984 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.

WE NEVER

19841984 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…

Eighty-eight

19841984 views77 comments66 favs

She realised that things you can't prove can be more intimate than the things you know to be true.

Leox

19841984 views66 comments22 favs

Whoever came up with the term kismet is an absolute moron. There isn't a single reason, or word, that can describe what exactly my brain has concocted in the face of him. No, kismet isn't what makes it happen. It's my own stupidity..

Hard To Know You Can't Go Back

19841984 views55 comments11 fav

The light against the nylon walls of the tent gets me feeling a little down. The air's wet inside, but it's warm. The whole world outside is creaking and chirping, everything that wakes up with the dawn's first tepid blue light does so and starts making n

MONSOON

19841984 views55 comments33 favs

a beautiful cool quiet day

Pink

19831983 views88 comments22 favs

The midsummer sky is black above us when I hear Dad say my name, quiet like I’ve never heard before. I let my hands drop away from my face and crawl towards him.

Light Shot Water

19831983 views99 comments44 favs

Where I grew up, you did not venture casually into ocean waters.

Squishy

19831983 views44 comments22 favs

Martin named it “Squishy” for two reasons. The first reason was because it was the noise it made when it came out of the hole in his basement. The second is because it’s what it did to Grandfather...

Mystery by the Bay

19831983 views00 comments00 favs

The water was like glass except for a ripple here and there where Spearing were jumping. Joe didn’t know whether they were playing or avoiding being lunch for larger fish. He set up shop above the point where, light years ago, his father, a fisherman, had

Better Days

19831983 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.

Last Poem

19831983 views2020 comments1818 favs

or the voice that wants/ to be inscribed/ forgets the sounds

Crane Man

19831983 views11 comment00 favs

Inside my high-rise studio apartment there are only three locations where Crane Man can't see me. The bathroom is one—although he watches me go in and he watches me come out. Crane Man does a lot of watching. Sometimes it seems he spends more time looking…

Break-up Bars (A Recipe...)

19831983 views00 comments00 favs

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

The not so great Popsicle caper

19831983 views2222 comments88 favs

"Ha ha!" I said triumphantly, "I've got some left and you don't!"

My Wife, My Love

19831983 views2121 comments1818 favs

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

George, Love, Shakespeare and Company

19831983 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.)

Ibambe

19831983 views1616 comments1313 favs

If this was the day when the bribes of whiskey and US dollars would fail to work. If on this day a black bag, smelling of shit and fear, would be pulled over his head – the bloodied roots of a knocked out tooth tickling his neck.

Phantom head syndrome

19821982 views33 comments22 favs

The Bird King suffers from phantom head syndrome. Ever since his decapitation by a critic, he has felt pain where his head used to be. Sometimes it wakes him in the night. It's so excruciating, he fumbles for a saw. But alas! there's nothing to chop off.He's seen every…

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

19821982 views55 comments44 favs

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