Most read stories

Dear Helen

18021802 views1111 comments22 favs

I watched you knee deep in water with a little boy you were hitting.

Drift

18021802 views1414 comments77 favs

Dreams & foghorns.

The Moral of This Story Is

18021802 views88 comments77 favs

Always take the train.

Marjan’s Tooth

18021802 views00 comments00 favs

When my feet touched the ground on the tarmac at Bagram I cannot begin to describe the feeling I had. It was as if God had spoken to me directly, whispering in the cold mountain air: “Son of Marjan, I welcome you.” The feeling took hold and overcame m

The Edge of Night

18021802 views33 comments33 favs

The night wrapped its arms around us as we drove west, taking the highway past Medford towards Philly. The kids were asleep in the backseat and we were both counting the mile markers, staring out the windows with quiet eyes. I listened to the drone of the…

Crackle

18021802 views88 comments66 favs

As he brushes his shoulders against other people's shoulders until he almost has no shoulders –

A Clue Found Aboard a Zen Mind's Floating Iceberg

18011801 views88 comments77 favs

I do so want to bring you into the sacred linguistically eternal loop of all ordinary things on earth, but it can so easily turn into a very sudden unsparing trapdoor, or a hissing angry knot tying up itself into even more tricky sorts …

He Brings Things Closer

18011801 views33 comments33 favs

Behind the plastic kitchen, where the special children sometimes sit, a large boy in tight dungarees had grabbed Stephanie's hair in one fist.

Writer's Cough

18011801 views66 comments66 favs

Ok, so I’m sitting here trying to write through a frigging cold. And I. . .Oops, . . . . . . wait a sec!. . . I’m stopped, astounded, stunned between coughing my left lung clear over my keyboard and watching it flopping on the back of my desk. . .

Faith, Hope, and Charity

18011801 views1515 comments1212 favs

She wears three or four tattered sweaters on cool days. She pushes a basket borrowed from a grocery store. There is a plastic lawn bag in the basket with God knows what inside.

Security

18011801 views1010 comments11 fav

Her preferred post-coital activity is to pant, to suck in air with urgent greed.

Lule of Raw - 3

18011801 views44 comments33 favs

"I'll tell you one thing I don't want to see, armed confrontation, leading to domestic warfare."

The Galleries

18011801 views2020 comments1111 favs

We invent our beauties// as we find them and engineer/ our horrors

Sky Without a Song

18011801 views66 comments66 favs

He hung up and I sang some whiney lyric about wanting him back. You know the songs that say the same shit: I’m an idiot. Love me anyway. I’m Velcro with nothing to stick to and you’re a nappy surface that gives me a reason to exist.

WOMAN DISPOSED OF

18011801 views44 comments44 favs

sex trafficking

The Death of Childhood Heroes (or "Roadkill")

18001800 views44 comments00 favs

We were pushing ninety down the highway through a stretch of what rightfully should have been called the Badlands. We were both absorbed and coping with the rapidly escalating stages of desperation and so neither of us noticed when the yellow figure stepped…

Gregory Dates a Witch

18001800 views99 comments44 favs

None of us took it too seriously when Gregory from underwriting said he was dating a real-life witch. Being an underwriter is not as interesting as say being a writer. That's why the greatest underwriter in America, Ajit Jain, gets paid per hour what Jame

A Little Bit of Syrup

18001800 views55 comments33 favs

"I made up my mind then, in the backseat, sucking on a cherry Popsicle, that I wanted to be like Ruby’s mother..."

I used to think the sun was the moon

18001800 views55 comments22 favs

I imagined the sun to be the moon and discovered it was not on a road trip in California where I noticed the sun on one side and the moon on the other.

Three Degrees of Separation from the Same Thing We Were Still Supposed to be Thinking About

18001800 views33 comments22 favs

It was hard to believe that, even very recently, there had been first days of school where nothing happened.

Writing Coach Helps Blocked Women Tap Inner Meanness

18001800 views88 comments77 favs

“Susan,” he says menacingly, as if he’s a husband who’s caught a cheating wife in a discreet liaison with another man. “I thought I made myself clear about this sort of thing.”

Paris in the the Spring

18001800 views1616 comments1111 favs

he thought of her / longingly

Refuge

18001800 views66 comments22 favs

cotton balls in your ears do not deafen you to the rocking of your mother's bed...as she and the new uncle set forth on the turbulent sea of their maiden voyage.

Clockwork

18001800 views44 comments44 favs

At any moment, she'll come outside to pick up the day’s newspaper. He can see it resting beneath the blooming crape myrtle, its plastic wrapper glistening with dew.

SoliTaire

18001800 views44 comments44 favs

She couldn’t help but wonder what 93 year-old Sohrabjee looked for in the torn, dusty lithograph of Marilyn in Persia one of the orderlies had stuck to the wall of the corridor outside Jasmine Wing decades ago.

Creator

18001800 views1212 comments77 favs

What purpose other than misery/ can cancer serve? And Parkinson's,/ AIDS, and STDs?

Criminals

18001800 views44 comments11 fav

What about the goons? Those criminals thwarted and left for dead in every action movie for the past thirty years. I'm sure at least a dozen survived the slaughters. I'm sure at least one or two came out if it reformed. This one who quit working for Columbian drug smugglers…

Please Take

18001800 views44 comments44 favs

I have a ball-pein hammer in my coat pocket.

Restland,

18001800 views1515 comments1010 favs

He died a printer finding late/ after so much selling himself selling/ a craft that pleased and paid enough

Heather.

18001800 views00 comments00 favs

Gone Heather, with her hands in her hair, silent for help, over-involved now scared.