Most read stories

Hummingbird hearts in a breadbox

19891989 views99 comments66 favs

We married in the ruins of a pachinko hall, the tiny bones in the pocket of your tracksuit luring a pack of wild dogs out from the underpass.

Scum

19891989 views66 comments55 favs

I am in the bad habit of telling people they are the scum of the earth.

Just Another Rainy Day

19881988 views1717 comments66 favs

Tasha loved to tease the rain. She sat still with her legs folded on the bench, never once looking the clouds in the eye.

Why They Cried: Jisette

19881988 views44 comments00 favs

There was that long weekend she'd spent lazing around a suite at the Beverly Wilshire between the Golden Globes and the Oscars with the suddenly now married actor, and then there had been Cabo. This was before the current thing and before the thing before

The Killer

19881988 views88 comments44 favs

It don't knock you down to the goddamned ground and push your face into the mat and dare you to get back up. Just so it can knock you down again. They don't have real dreams. Dreams that make them wake up in the middle of the night. Hurting. Wanting.

Medusas

19881988 views22 comments11 fav

I didn’t kiss Odgeir because I fancied him, I kissed him because I knew other people fancied him.

Cousin (from The New Yorker)

19881988 views22 comments00 favs

...to know something people around you don’t know can put you outside of them. And then you can’t get back in...

When He Left it all to Me

19881988 views3636 comments2020 favs

Where did you go?

Mathilda Is Not My Girlfriend

19871987 views1717 comments1010 favs

Some idiot was gonna let a snake eat him. I know, but I saw it on the internets. That's some dumb-assed stuff right there. Everyone knows about snakes. The Jesus book tells us all about them, inside us, slithering through ruby-red and eating our guilt from inside out.…

THE MOON, THE SUN, AND RYAN W. BRADLEY (not quite a fortune-telling)

19871987 views33 comments11 fav

“That’s just Ryan W. Bradley—son of a bitch knows better by now.”

You, Cliché

19871987 views1616 comments1515 favs

You might as well be the man on the moon. Once touching your face was quotidian. When I tallied each day's pleasures, you, in this room or that, counted too much for me, I think. I stopped record keeping. I'm …

Martyr

19871987 views55 comments11 fav

The waitress says, “That’s a memory,” as the smoke dances around her head.

Little Green Rednecks

19871987 views00 comments00 favs

“I was listenin' ta one o' them Terran religious broadcasts 'bout Mother Earth when they up an' says that global warmin' was all the fault o' mankind, an' they had ta make the non-believers see that all the drivin' they did, an' all the stuff they bought

Naming the Beauties

19871987 views2222 comments1414 favs

the signature of God/ consigning everything/ to the saturating energies of time.

En Pointe

19871987 views22 comments00 favs

Her gaunt arms softly rose, sweeping in front of her with movements that were hesitant at first but, as the music that only she could hear took her in its grip, became graceful and assured.

Paperwork

19871987 views11 comment00 favs

There were literally thousands of criteria that got people of every stripe and strata on the list, which had been maintained since before the very first human fingers scrawled crude images on blank surfaces. 

Make-Believe

19871987 views1212 comments99 favs

My sister plays Jesus.

Harpoon

19871987 views99 comments66 favs

he’s recognizable in the earliest images of misery: a hand shoving a young gladiator before the lion; the fire devouring a witch in Salem. And here he is. Again.

Mercury Unbound - 4

19871987 views2020 comments88 favs

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

Beckett not Joyce

19861986 views66 comments44 favs

Gorgonzola. It's what she was to bring this time. Plumtree's potted meat. What it was last time.

Beards

19861986 views33 comments22 favs

One day my mother's lover shaved his beard and legs. Said he couldn’t fit into his tight jeans anymore.

Better

19851985 views00 comments00 favs

... all my friends are girls; I like opera; I can answer all the questions about male and female ejaculation – without stammering – in sex ed. classes. And Braydon? In boardshorts, tall and tanned and naked from the waist up ...

Bunny Ears

19851985 views00 comments11 fav

Word traveled fast at school on Monday. Emma Jakowski had actually captured him. He was being held in her dad's tool shed. Anyone who wanted to see him had to be in the Jakowski's backyard by 3:15 that afternoon, chocolate bunny ears in hand. It was no…

The Jewish Goodbye

19851985 views00 comments00 favs

"And secondly, it’s never bing bing bing with you. It’s like, bing bang bongity bumbity bum yadda yadda bla bla bla.” Sam stopped short and glanced down at his shoes. He knew he’d gone too far.

Six Short Poems

19851985 views88 comments33 favs

Can't please everyone / Or sail in all directions / Sail on / Stay the course / Still the ill-pleased storms come / To suck the wind from my sails

Disbelief

19851985 views00 comments00 favs

It's Christmas!

This, About The Man I Met Out Here In Nearly Nowhere

19851985 views33 comments22 favs

Out here in nearly nowhere I met this man. About him I know something something, and no one can tell me otherwise.

Kurosawa's Rain

19851985 views22 comments22 favs

The rain fell from the roof. It fell from my voice and and my eyes. Toshiro's Kukichiro stomped gutshot through the mud with his katana. Young and beautiful, Mifumi died there on the screen though he doesn't really die for fifty or more years, they think from something…

Far Star Girl

19851985 views88 comments33 favs

She thought maybe an angel had called out her name. She wasn't sure. She was waiting for her older sister to return with Jujy Fruits and bonbons. The theater, neither light nor dark, was to Cassie's ten-year-old mind, an appropriate-enough setting for a v

Trapeze Artist

19841984 views1515 comments1313 favs

Solitude is such an excellent alternative to suicide.