I never thought I’d miss the sound of church bells, reminding me of my sudden apostasy, faintly ringing over the rumpus where even the birds can’t get a word in edgeways.

I was a six year old with no bike. Only the males in my familyhad that privilege. So one morning I got up very early, before the older siblings awoke, crept out the back porch door where Iknew there would be two bikes in the yard just waiting for me and my…

The wind rushed by her and she heard the faint sound of barking. And then she knew why she was coming. And she ran.

Her wrinkles came into focus, the sort of old woman's face photographed for coffee tables and art galleries and corporate boardrooms, for prize juries and grant selection committees, and Luc searched his formidable memory for an exact match. Over the long, tedious…

Jacob could tell it was a man he had just walked past, a broken man with an olive green Vietnam era military jacket, a man who had probably served his country as honorably as anyone chosen at lottery and forced to kill for a subsistence wage…

Dark, green grass covered the pasture like millions of tiny fingers swaying in the heat.

My server wore cat's eye glasses, a Wonderbra that made her breasts like the embryos from Alien wanting to burst their way out of her Hooters t-shirt but couldn't.

“Hey,” I begin, a naughty smile breaking across my face before I can get to the punchline, “Want to drive around flipping off anyone with a Romney bumper sticker?” Kaleb chuckles and beams at me. It seems everyone likes a good girl turned naughty.

My love for him like wax wings/ so long they stretched eternal— beating in the sky, grazing peaks,

But they all know the parking prayer...

It rises rigid and plumb from its heavy base, the severity of line yielding to grace only at the throat where it crests into a subtly constrictive pinch.

The DC-9 bounced in the turbulence over the north Pacific waking the dozing Ben Clarone.

The Kharal kept us safe, we knew, kept the colony functional in the oft belabored effort that was living our small, human lives surrounded by death, for in their ring of constant invisible protection, when they did not come, we thrived. It was not as tho

They may have heard parts of it, the memoir in me. Then I took a trip—to New York, though they wouldn't have known where—and when I returned, I was entirely mum unless I had the phone with me.

The old man behind the counter recognizes fear and anxiety in the boy's face, and sees the brown paper bag clenched in his other white-knuckled hand.