Most read stories

Semi Tiresias

19771977 views1212 comments1111 favs

I knew my mother would die by the weekend

Obituary

19771977 views77 comments55 favs

He drifted for years: No forwarding. No phone.

The Dooleys

19761976 views22 comments22 favs

Mama told me never to play with the Dooley boys. They play too rough, they’re not to be trusted, and no one has seen Mrs. Dooley since she tried to clean out their tree house. Mama would always say, “You play with the Dooley Boys, you play with Satan.”

Boom

19761976 views66 comments22 favs

It was as if a car bomb went off in Beaver Cleaverville.

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

19761976 views33 comments11 fav

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

In Machu Picchu

19761976 views55 comments11 fav

"I wonder what happened to Murder Man and Lust Girl?" wondered The Black Toadstool. The Anti-Justice League were in Machu Picchu, on a short vacation after taking over most of South America and the South Pole. The South Pole had been so easy. …

The Soft, Cool Blanket of Night

19761976 views00 comments00 favs

wrap me in the soft, cool blanket of night. waning,the moon peers down at melike the heavy-lidded eye of some cyclops. and if I be lost like poor Odysseus,cloak me in the soft, warm wool of night. and if my eyes fail me like old Tiresias,stitch the cloth with…

Hummingbird hearts in a breadbox

19761976 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.

Animals

19761976 views44 comments44 favs

I folded my problems into pretty paper animals to keep me company. I set them on the Formica dinette set. I jammed some into cracks so they’d stand up straight: organized warfare

C O N F L A T E

19751975 views55 comments22 favs

She jumped into the hole the other day. The hole that sucks little girls into the universe, and doesn't return them. I had to watch it. I had to watch her sitting on the dock. Lean over, and fall in. I couldn't have saved her. Nor God. Or Jesus. Not the bridge. …

Far Star Girl

19751975 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

Note from the wilderness

19741974 views2727 comments77 favs

It's a business, after all, all are quick to remind us. True dat, and the sun always rises in the east and sets in the west, and death and taxes...yup yup, we know. We get it.

Mabel Constructed the Quintessential Boundary.

19741974 views2222 comments1010 favs

Mabel constructed the quintessential boundary. She carefully boiled down her pots and pans, her jewelry, her copper kettle, and the foils from forty six bottles of white pear cider into a silky metallic stew. Mable smeared the mixture onto a burlap…

The Jewish Goodbye

19741974 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.

My Tongue

19741974 views1111 comments55 favs

A nun once told me to watch my tongue. This is not an easy thing to do.

Little Green Rednecks

19741974 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

Why Men Compete

19741974 views2222 comments1212 favs

It starts on the Fallopian Speedway

Half-and-Half

19741974 views22 comments11 fav

Terry worked in a factory out in Northlake where she added a little squirt of milk and another little squirt of cream to those tiny half-and-half coffee creamers you find at every motel in the country. The owner of that factory hired only women to work

Paperwork

19741974 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. 

Better

19731973 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 ...

Gemma's Story

19731973 views1414 comments77 favs

I respect mom, she survived cancer and all while she was pregnant with me, but something about getting through all that crap made her heart tough, like an over-cooked piece of beef, and no one likes meat you have to chew forever.

Bunny Ears

19731973 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…

Why They Cried: Jisette

19731973 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

En Pointe

19731973 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.

Reading at the Anatomy Museum

19731973 views22 comments11 fav

If you know how, all bodies can be read like books, like poems, like scraps of song

Harpoon

19731973 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.

Sea Floor Fever, or The Note that Came With the Stone to the Head

19721972 views1212 comments1010 favs

I'm dying but that's not to say what you think it says. I've crossed the river of myself many, many times before and wandered to the shore, broken and drenched and full of the fever of dyingdreams. Each time was a kind of ritual mask, drying off the beat ofmy newly…

Their Nipples

19721972 views00 comments11 fav

The soft twin winds of peace and harmony flow through your nipples It is not milk that gives such flow but the whiff of life’s spirit, the wind of poetry the renewal and the silence of the love you give me I suck like a new

Cousin (from The New Yorker)

19721972 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...

Down on the Pharm

19721972 views00 comments00 favs

I found my patch by accident whilst out picking medicinals ta cover a load o' dead constrictors. I tested the patch in the traditional way an' got a bit stoned on jes' a nibble o' a fresh sprout. Course, everyone knows the sprouts 're more concentrated t