Most read stories

Annals of the Naked Rowdies #22

18331833 views33 comments00 favs

As they left, Roddy kicked over a statue of a blindfold and half-naked goddess of justice. "I piss on you Justice!" he yelled. The bailiff pushed him out the door as he continued his rant, inaudible.

Sky Without a Song

18331833 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.

Prologue: April 16, 1970

18321832 views11 comment11 fav

The muster zone was south of U.S. 119, off the Halleck Road. The search began on a large parcel, some 75 acres of farmland, property of one Mr. Shakelford. Shakelford had allowed the earth to go wild; brush, thistle and small…

The Rhythm of the Cows

18321832 views77 comments44 favs

A cow wanders onto a roof and falls through the skylight. It's a calamity, but such an innocent mistake. Mightn't you amble onto a rooftop once upon a full winter snow in Vermont?Another cow climbs a gravel mound in…

Graduation (For My Mother)

18321832 views33 comments33 favs

I know I’m slipping into my mother’s skin. I answer the phone with her voice; her hands grind the coffee beans. And who is this listening to NPR in the morning while the fresh-faced girls in the neighborhood trudge toward school,, peonies han

The Adventures of Tequila Kitty: Chapter 3 - by Brian Lepire

18321832 views11 comment11 fav

I’d made it to the motel parking lot when I heard the footsteps. A sombrero may make me look good, but it does shit for my hearing, so the bastards were able to scoop me up real quick. The first one gave me a hard slap on the top of the head with an opene

Scene from the Clinic

18321832 views11 comment11 fav

No way to know why she's here, but scars and scabs can hold more information than a file or chart.

Maritzer's Axiom

18321832 views88 comments66 favs

We were just as bourgeois as Bloomingdale’s, one generation past canned ravioli dinners with cheap white bread.

Local Man Makes Good

18321832 views66 comments44 favs

A junkyard Bison seems an odd choice over the usual dog, but it did the job--trampling trespassers, vagrants and unautorized salvagers with a violent and admirable efficiency

The Red Suitcase: (Conclusion)

18321832 views77 comments55 favs

—You must be joking, he laughed.

A Black Cat

18321832 views66 comments44 favs

And then, and then, and then! After all that, this. After all that bullshit with her Dad, the Associate Principal, the idiotic counselor, and that psychotic police officer, after all that, this: a dead black cat. Blocking her path! Right in the middle of the street! …

entwined

18321832 views11 comment00 favs

you and i exist outside of the chaos and noise entwined in eternal embrace

Pharaoh

18321832 views1111 comments66 favs

Altodog was dressed in filthy chef’s trousers and a long-sleeved purple dress shirt, somewhat dignified by a tattered black vest.

The Birds

18321832 views1212 comments1313 favs

My wife goes away for a few days to the little town where Hitchcock filmed The Birds.

The Death of Childhood Heroes (or "Roadkill")

18311831 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…

A Body Divided, 1

18311831 views00 comments00 favs

A Body Divided: Memoir 1 When I came back home, after coming down with polio, everything had changed for me. I'd been gone for forty-five long days and nights. But it was Halloween, a time very nearly sacred for children in the Midwest, and it broug

Twin Lakes of Whiskey

18311831 views77 comments44 favs

not that we ever had before

Driving Old

18311831 views1212 comments1111 favs

I drive old now

Building

18311831 views66 comments22 favs

he told me to be careful,my feet may bleedI watched him walk up and down the path,occasionally bendingwhy?carpenter nails, pieces of broken shinglesall along the pathnow I know why

MY WAR

18311831 views1111 comments33 favs

In May of 1982, my daughter and I planned a trip…

Her Hair, a Braid

18311831 views1818 comments88 favs

She’s there, in a tin, loosely wound beneath sepia tissue paper, a braid to worry in your fingers.

The Room Below

18311831 views11 comment11 fav

The closed door swallowed up both voices, and all I could make out afterward were muffled pleas and angry answers that died completely.

The Signal

18311831 views44 comments33 favs

I take the plastic off of the last videotape and stick it in the VCR. I make sure the channel is on 6. Still a commercial. I get my notebook, turn it to the next page and write today's date on top. I get ready. I don't really like the back and forth banter the other news…

from MLKNG SCKLS

18311831 views22 comments22 favs

94% Battery Power Remaining Last night I dreamt about a mutt whose tail never learned how to wag, and under a sun that gagged us with heat, the mutt sat stoned with its mouth belching cones of pot smoke. Sometimes the smoke shone orange – sometim

Criminals

18311831 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…

To My Children, With Apologies

18311831 views22 comments00 favs

My apologies also for those crowded roads you and your families have to drive on. My generation would have built more public transportation but, in all honesty, we just didn't give a damn.

The Alarm

18311831 views00 comments00 favs

Harris Tobiasharristob@gmail.comThe Alarm A terrible clanging in the middle of the night roused me from my bed. I put on some clothes and hurried into the street there to mingle with my bleary eyed neighbors. At first we thought it was a fire but there was…

The Conversation Killer

18311831 views66 comments33 favs

I stand corrected once more.

A Clue Found Aboard a Zen Mind's Floating Iceberg

18301830 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 …

The Celebrity

18301830 views22 comments00 favs

I love reading about myself. There's nothing more gratifying than seeing my name in the paper, knowing so many people are interested in who I am and what I do.