Most read stories

Strip (Her)

19441944 views77 comments66 favs

There’s not enough cigarette cloud to conceal her, malnourished and pale beneath blue and pink lights that summon 80s-era skate rinks. She saunters towards the center of the stage, asking her bored expression to convey detachment, while a DJ that fits the

You are beautiful just the way you are

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There were avocados splayed across menus like 1950′s pinup girls–all thigh and curve. Avocados in California omelets. Avocados split and diced, sprayed with lime, slapped on bagels, served with tomato.

Golgotha

19441944 views22 comments00 favs

They were starting to get winded. The boy, his father and his little brother were hiking up a hill, cutting a diagonal path through hay-colored grass towards an outcrop of craggy boulders below the hill's summit.

haircut month

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The same night your best friend of two years called you up to tell you they don't want to think about you anymore was the same night you had stood silently, leaning, head against the mustard wall in your mom's boyfriend's house, stuck listening to Randy…

The Guardian

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A Quantum of Disappointment

19431943 views1818 comments1212 favs

Reality winks at us then scampers off

Maître d’

19431943 views1717 comments1515 favs

Before the days of “customer experience,” Eddie figured out whatever information he could about his clients. He asked them for business cards, recorded their phone numbers from the reservation book, snapped photos of them in his mind…

A Conversation between a Dead Man, Himself and His Alarm Clock

19431943 views33 comments00 favs

He was dead when he tried to wake up. “Wake up,” he yelled silently to himself, although it didn’t sound silent to his voice. “Brr, brr, brr,” shouted his alarm clock as it glared two red fives, a colon and a seven

Assay the Assail

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No one is a Puritan under all that powder!

Fear the Future: 25 Brief Tales in Various Keys of Woe, Fear, and Loathing

19431943 views1313 comments66 favs

The three were up early to await the deer with rifles, ammunition, and coffee.

The Birth of Girma Dali

19421942 views11 comment11 fav

Amid the swerve and pulse of hungry bodies Girma Dali picks his spot, a tissue-wide patch of net where's he going to strike. A green-jerseyed defender closes in on him his brute momentum unleashed like a kamikaze pilot swooping into enemy orbit, his lunging body makes…

Twenty-Ten

19421942 views00 comments00 favs

He picked her out of the crowd at Club Mai, easy when you knew what to look for: long, dark hair, pretty Latina face, store-bought tits. This one wore a tight dress that showed off her legs, sculpted to perfection by God and a pair of four-inch stilettos.

Purple IV

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Purple not rain! I guess Prince left. It is said that Prince owned the aquifer under Jordan, Minnesota, and that he sold it but to whom? And moved to Canada—

David and Goliath

19421942 views99 comments88 favs

The giant hurled threats and insults. He brandished a knife that was a foot long.

Missing Letter

19421942 views1515 comments1010 favs

It's so far to get to where we aren't inthe way of someone's destructive progress.I'm only walking in my own gardensnow, but the big blue house is like an emptiedout envelope. I guess that makes this themissing letter. I don't know your heart's newaddress, but I once…

Stories Around People

19421942 views1212 comments44 favs

Stories Around People An Event Facebook lived in midtown, for there the people and windows shone like water. Though it would board the bus—1 day—and ride to the sea, where people said words like sea and where the city shone in the waves…

Hymen

19421942 views88 comments66 favs

For me German was a school subject. For Hymen, who could pronounce German but not speak it, it was a poetic technique or element, shorthand for what ails the world.

The Ouija Board Guide to True Facts about Cremation

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Oh, and take off all your jewelry unless you want your relatives sifting you through a window screen looking for your diamond.

The Laughing Grave

19421942 views1010 comments77 favs

Newhouse returned his gaze to his wet palm, which he lifted to his nose with suspicion, sniffed again and again, then struggled to move out from under the growing stream.

AA For the Suicidal - alt.punk extract

19411941 views11 comment11 fav

The drive back to Sac does nothing to sober me up, either, and although Avaline and I are ready to hurl, she takes me to her afternoon support group, “Lean On Me: A Place for Manic-Depressive and Bipolar Sufferers to Come Together.”

Traum

19411941 views1010 comments55 favs

Over our short, yet enduring relationship, I found that he was desperately trying to reconcile his ambitions with his situation. I left and he continued to be unhappy, trying to "fix" what he now realized had been broken all along. In the end, a span of a

Is it True about all the Lies

19411941 views88 comments44 favs

He wrote, wrote, wrote with the sharp eye of an eagle...

Encasement

19411941 views22 comments00 favs

A universe, all of it, was encased in glass.

Fishers of Hope

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June Day sprinted with urgency through the halls of the Armistice. Whenever she passed a window looking out into space, if it wasn't already covered, she didn't bother looking out, but not because of her hurry; no one did anymore. She was young, but the…

Notes from Underground

19411941 views1212 comments77 favs

The end is rehearsed over and over;/ in a world without heaven all is farewell.

Here Comes the Sun

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I watch my brother carry her into the hospital, and I love him with parts of myself I didn’t know were capable of love. I love my brother with the space behind my eyes, the skin between my fingers, the ends of my hair, the crease in my neck. I love him wi

Did I Tell You I Have Stripes On My Socks?

19401940 views88 comments55 favs

Kids are fascinated by me. Adults look the other way. Maybe it's my size. Or maybe it's the stories in the newspapers.

All I Know About Grandfather

19401940 views66 comments44 favs

There were days in my youth when, through no fault of their own, my parents could not drive me the seven mile trip to my elementary school. When I got older they bought me a bike and that proved duly adequate as conveyance. But when I was six years in age

The Paris American

19401940 views44 comments22 favs

He returned to America on the Fourth of July. Twisting in his cramped window seat miles above the Atlantic, he buckled up before the descent. “You can handle this,” he muttered. Hungover, still reeling from the dreamy head-turning experience of…

To My Students, After Paris

19401940 views1313 comments1010 favs

I will not tell you that your anger is wrong, child.