Most read stories

A Time for Peace

20212021 views1313 comments1111 favs

When she opens the door, I say hi and introduce her to my friend, a bottle of J.T.S. Brown. She laughs and tells me to come on in before I fall down.

A memory of worms

20212021 views66 comments33 favs

Seph loved to scare her mother in the garden by picking up a worm with the tines of her gardening fork and chasing her with it, the dirty-pink body twisting on the end. Dee would scream a little, always eyes on the worm, and run slowly, as if…

Like An Endless Rain

20212021 views22 comments11 fav

Fate could have sent me any number of Sergeant-Detectives, but fate sent me one of Boston’s finest, Sergeant-Detective Sheila Magnuson. Aside from being a little undernourished Sheila Magnuson is possibly the world’s most beautiful Sergeant-Detective.

George, Love, Shakespeare and Company

20212021 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.)

Stupid's Rising Up

20202020 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.

'Introduction' to LETTING IT ALL HANG OUT

20202020 views00 comments00 favs

Was Sligo an unfeeling privacy-violator or an uncannily-feeling empath, privy to the deepest longings of those whose lives he came in contact with? [...] Sligo's grave is as silent as these pages ultimately would be if they were left unread.

Big City

20202020 views55 comments11 fav

She takes her hamburgers medium rare and the pickles remind her of the taste of last night's penis before she stuffed the stranger's apologies in a jar.

Leox

20202020 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..

The Misanthrope Confesses

20202020 views1818 comments1515 favs

I murdered my inner child/ at 7 and neither denied/ nor confessed the act until now.

The Forefinger of Lenin

20202020 views1010 comments44 favs

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

Breakfast Dance - a 55 word story

20202020 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…

Pink

20192019 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.

Independent Living

20192019 views1717 comments77 favs

The transformation in their domineering, sour mother revised her children’s memories of their childhoods.

Middle Age

20192019 views1818 comments1414 favs

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

Ann, meet Bob

20182018 views44 comments00 favs

Ann finally got her eyes to focus, and there he was, her husband, looking better and happier than she'd seen him in ages, with the same Bombshell she'd seen him with earlier (So it was him). His hand was on the small of her back and he was talking and she

This is Why We Can Never Have Nice Things

20182018 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…

Welcome to our community

20182018 views00 comments00 favs

“Yeah, she's a real slut,” many contestants' mothers say. “If he could only keep it in his pants, he'd probably be able to stay in the country,” others say about their sons

Black Wheat, 2

20182018 views55 comments22 favs

They are really living (they) say things they don't mean . . . Do not know what they say Take the path without heart, seeing the image . . . The moon rises above them It does not move their blood Nothing calls out to their blo

You Can't Even Clink

20182018 views88 comments88 favs

your matching glasses up to mine in the fake air anymore, or click your widening fingernails against the hard bed railings in protest of anything you might be feeling in the floating silt-like depths of your jagged nerves, but…

Just like I read the news

20182018 views66 comments66 favs

She sang will you still need me

Saturday Night at the Yeti Fight

20182018 views33 comments00 favs

“What part of ‘only bettors can watch the Yeti fight’ do you not understand?!”, he yelled. “Either place a bet or get the hell out of here!” I begrudgingly gave him all of the money I had on me, about two hundred, and placed it on Demonio B

Out of Uniform

20182018 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'…

Three

20182018 views1111 comments44 favs

Men and their inevitable disappointments—sure, why not?

Tilly Artaud

20182018 views1717 comments77 favs

After not going out for weeks, I went to a bar and met an electrical engineer, a motorcycle racer who raced in the Black Hills, a Renaissance man, in a relationship with a young married woman, and I told him about the toad.

Resolutions

20182018 views33 comments33 favs

Portions of my heart and bones

Awaken Sleepy Star

20182018 views88 comments77 favs

Don't sleep. Tiny orange Balloons like seahorses are bobbing This way and that trying To get your hair to lift Off its marvelously mud- Swamped and pillowy support beams, blue sea strand by green. Don't you want to see…

MONSOON

20182018 views55 comments33 favs

a beautiful cool quiet day

Boredom & Ennui

20172017 views00 comments00 favs

I had a weird feeling I had just validated his behavior — provided another tile in the mosaic of his ego and self-esteem — by doing nothing more than entering this hall of mirrors, and reflecting.

Apology + Opportunity

20172017 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.

Please Come to Boston? (Memoir)

20172017 views11 comment00 favs

I've been invited to speak at Emerson College in Boston—it will be the summer of 2012, and I'll be speaking on running an online literary magazine; in this case, my own, Anderbo.com.