Most read stories

Though the Heart be Still as Loving

19371937 views22 comments11 fav

With my heart preserved, I shoved a handful of baubles back in its place: some pages torn from my favorite books, a bass guitar string, a butane lighter, a shot of vodka. I stitched myself back up and left the roof in favor of the attic, where I hung my s

Dry Rot

19361936 views00 comments00 favs

Sometimes Seattle's the next thing to heaven. The sky's diamond blue, the sun's a caress; your whole soul can breathe. You know what the shouting's about. But the sun quickly fades to Protestant gray and the gray last a long…

How I Made My Fortune

19361936 views00 comments00 favs

At the time I first went to work for Mr. Byron my family was in a sorrowful state. My dad, much as I can recall, was one of those roving kinds, called himself a carpenter or contractor, depending on the kind of job he was aspiring to, and was subject to f

Kiss & make up

19361936 views33 comments22 favs

“You wanna fight.” And I say yes. And he says – “First, we gotta make out.”

Epitaph N+1

19361936 views1818 comments1616 favs

We die in order to get some rest

On The Sly

19351935 views44 comments44 favs

She was a sucker punch.

1985...What I wanted

19351935 views1313 comments99 favs

with cool confidence and believable body language

The Night Bird

19351935 views00 comments00 favs

A night bird lands on the windowsill with a struggling copper moth in its beak. The bird cocks its head at Rasmus, then swallows the clockwork insect in a gulp before flying away.

Prairie Yields

19351935 views2222 comments1515 favs

The river’s not/ a river but/ a FEMA map/ of flooding probabilities.

Whale Lessons

19351935 views1717 comments1010 favs

Even if your heart is as large as a small car, your tongue as heavy as two grown men—even then—you will have to carry it with you wherever you go.

Super Collider

19351935 views1010 comments22 favs

I never pulled it off, never rode an atom through a super collider with a nose full of cocaine and a drink in my hand. Never was a bullet, zooming through the city, skin pressed to bone, nerves on fire. Never was an atom bomb, ever-exploding in slow motion, ripping off…

Bubble Gum and Paperback Books

19351935 views1010 comments1010 favs

A block after his first crime, he found a bookstore to commit another.

Tilly Artaud

19351935 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.

Sonnet Nought

19351935 views33 comments22 favs

Miraculous tarantulas, and octopii, have many limbs akimbo, Two have you: and they are better than be kept in zoo. Thine eyne are like the marbles that my youth had held in limbo, ‘Cept even better yet, for they are fairly lashed and greeny-blue. Your…

Record of a Living Being

19351935 views11 comment11 fav

Kurosawa was silent as we traipsed through the destruction, carefully side-stepping piles of sodden pages and heaps of swollen, broken-backed texts. Workers in coveralls used wide brooms to push water toward a floor-drain at the back of the store.

Secret Life of Storms

19351935 views66 comments55 favs

Someday, the Grim Reaper, wrapped in hooded cowl, the thorny stem of a red rose clenched between his teeth, will climb up the garden trellis to my bedroom window

Need

19341934 views99 comments1010 favs

I knew I needed to visit a beach / made entirely of sharks’ teeth

Buoyancy

19341934 views22 comments11 fav

When I ate with my girls, Bliss and Victoria, I would lift my head up and look at us eating until I could imagine him chiding me. “Our daughters are looking more and more like you each day,” he’d say. “Fat!” I didn’t feel like eating when I thought abo

Mystery by the Bay

19341934 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

Independent Living

19341934 views1717 comments77 favs

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

To Kill a Deer

19341934 views33 comments33 favs

On September 12th, 2011, the ban on deer hunting became official. Apparently, the hunting and killing of deer had become too cruel. The ban had been a long time in the making. Ever since man began hunting deer way back in the day—somewhere between a fe

Upon Learning the Fetus Has Fingernails

19341934 views1111 comments44 favs

Upon learning the fetus has fingernails, Missy texts her boyfriend: It has nails! He won’t reply because he’s just left for war, but she does it just the same.

Everyone Is Going Away

19331933 views88 comments44 favs

“I don’t know what’s going on there,” Hank, who hated his name and wanted a more Biblical name because those names (Jeremiah! Matthew! David!)—although common—sound ominous, said as he pointed up to the top of the apartment building that housed the whores

fire and ice

19331933 views88 comments33 favs

“Who says?” she purred in reply “They all do” he countered smiling , chewing on an ice cube “All of them, huh?” She leaned forward, raising a wicked left eyebrow and whispered, “And just who are they, anyway?”

Big Dipper

19331933 views55 comments55 favs

“You’re not in Saigon anymore, Mai Bi'ch,” I said, craning to read her name badge. “They’ll need to be much better than that if you want to stay in this country.”

Floating Away

19331933 views1818 comments1717 favs

Soon, she will turn to liquid

A Little Fishing

19331933 views1212 comments99 favs

Harpo sits and looks at something I can't see. I drink beer and ask him questions. I ask him how they found the cancer. Backache, he says. He went to see a doctor.

Fall

19321932 views11 comment00 favs

The rustling of the dry leaves when he moved even slightly sounded like thunder to him, and he was sure if any of the other kids from the neighborhood got too close, it was the noise that would end up giving him away.

A Dispatch from an Enivironmental Lawyer Who is Trying to Grow a Mustache

19321932 views11 comment11 fav

Angelina Jolie, seducer of Brad Pitt, tattooed mother of rescued orphans, and the unlikely daughter of Jon Voight who broke Billy Bob Thornton's heart, is only two blocks from me, in a travel trailer on Seventh Street, gently rousing herself from sleep.

My Brother Outside a Cantina at Night, Mexico

19321932 views55 comments11 fav

in his thin, swanky black leather jacket out on the town at night in Mexico with his girlfriend