Most read stories

Looking Upwards

19551955 views1313 comments88 favs

Steel beams. Welds painted over green. Yellow numbers of some sort. Old phone booths. Tags on the walls. I looked up and saw where bits of water fall down from the overpass. Pigeon up there. Washing his wings or something like that. Greyness. I was in a truck.…

Golgotha

19551955 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.

Magnum Opus

19541954 views44 comments33 favs

The scaffolding had been difficult to construct. The rock floor of the bluff offered no purchase, so he'd been forced to anchor braces to the trees behind, then span some thirty feet. A cantilevered gallows reached another fifteen feet past the stage...

Pterodactyls

19541954 views1111 comments88 favs

In his head he thinks oh whatever when I wake this time I shall have a very fine discussion with Someone special, oh but finding meaning in anything nowadays that's Just too much rich flattery, isn't it, filthy mirror? Inside His head's…

Of Mugs and Men

19541954 views44 comments22 favs

I want to break that mug. (Break him.)

Monster Truck

19541954 views33 comments33 favs

In another lifetime the loft had been a shoe factory and I joked how in the dark of night I could hear the ghosts of lost soles speaking in tongues. There was the rolling of eyes, and when I repeated the joke to my therapist, who was actually sitting acr

Colonoscopy Serenade

19541954 views55 comments33 favs

Retired cantor Janice Woltag Cohen just turned 50. We Boomers all know what that means. It's Colonoscopy Time!Colonoscopy! That fabulous 50th birthday present you give to yourself. Yes, it's yucky. But it's absolutely necessary. (It could save your life.)As kids…

Rock On

19541954 views2525 comments1212 favs

...fancy the idea of tapas, Spain an' all.

The Laughing Grave

19541954 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.

Mule

19531953 views2222 comments1717 favs

Sometimes cats had to die or dogs

Arlene

19531953 views22 comments00 favs

His mother was not an aw-come-here-honey-and-give-me-a-hug type mom. She was the kind of mother who, if you had some kind of problem, would suggest that perhaps it might be a good idea to volunteer (she was really big on volunteering) at some sort of orga

Traum

19531953 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

Borden, Dream on Lord of the Pies.

19531953 views22 comments11 fav

A plague of dykes mattered not. This spider-girl had driven the world of thought from Borden’s mind.

Novel excerpt: "Home Cure"

19531953 views55 comments00 favs

He picked up the bottle of gin, looked at it. "Not a lot left," he said. "There's enough," she replied. She took the bottle and lifted it to her lips. "Are you ready?" she asked. "For what?" "You'll see."

Where Is Daddy?

19531953 views66 comments55 favs

He checks the bedrooms first, then the hallway, followed by the living room and the bathrooms. When he can't find you he takes to calling out, daddy, I'm sure the neighbors hear.

Graeme King and the Creature

19531953 views11 comment11 fav

Graeme King was disturbed. He sat at his desk feeling his bloodshot eyes rolling backwards, impatient, leaden in their sockets. Could he believe what he had just seen? Surely not. Surely the late nights spent absorbing the relentless pulse of his computer screen…

True Vocation

19531953 views11 comment11 fav

After lunch it's vocal coaching: shrieking, screaming, crying Oh-my-God!-Oh-my-God!-Oh-my-God!, panting and face fanning. Next it's ‘situational training', where we pretend to be audience members on real talk shows and practice everything we've learned th

The Little Dog from Outer Space

19531953 views1111 comments88 favs

I looked at her, shook my head and tried to smile. She smiled back, beaming a radiance that pushed away the chill.

Casting It

19531953 views1010 comments55 favs

Truth came out of it, a little bug that hovered there...

laundry

19531953 views1212 comments1010 favs

She’d once read the Time-Life Encyclopedia on The Universe and became obsessed with the woman from Alabama who was singled out, by a rock from a far place, in her sleep.

Wednesdays They Pay Us, But Now It's Thursday

19531953 views1616 comments1414 favs

fire rolls through the drive-thru

The Ouija Board Guide to True Facts about Cremation

19531953 views00 comments00 favs

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

Here Comes the Sun

19531953 views00 comments11 fav

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

Cut

19521952 views1515 comments88 favs

Effluvium is such a lovely word, so hey surprise it covers rancid butter, vomit, fertile gingko fruit trekked in from the pavement.

The Paris American

19521952 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…

First the Newborn Birds on High and Then the Awful Climbing Beasts

19521952 views1212 comments88 favs

"Stop watching the news!Because the news contrives to frighten youTo make you feel small and aloneTo make you feel that your mind isn't your own"--MorrisseyThe world has gone crazy, but please let me make you One of my healing songs. You can eat it now, if you…

Small Change

19521952 views1414 comments1414 favs

Life seemed okay…for the most part.

The Book Mind

19521952 views66 comments66 favs

The book mind, just like its namesake the book, is capable of movement only after its assembly: otherwise, it boasts no moving parts.

Hymen

19521952 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.

Yakkety-Yak

19521952 views33 comments33 favs

Last night, the station played me a dream of sexual promiscuity that included -- but was not limited to -- imaginative acts involving....