Most read stories

I Am Not Like All The Rest: Funny Lines From Online Dating Profiles

15111511 views1010 comments99 favs

After becoming single at age 62, I joined an online dating site. After a year of perusing profiles and meeting men for coffee, staying single is starting to look better and better to me. But I've stayed on the site, in part for the pure enjoyment of…

No Homo

15111511 views33 comments22 favs

We were talking in the dark in my room. He lay on a mattress on the floor. He came for a sleepover.

Meeting for a Drink

15111511 views11 comment11 fav

But the profligate are blameless now Those who conflate sex and love the way dumber animals mistake heat for light have moved freely back to some primal zone where if I’m felt to be contradictory to the surroundings it’s because I wanted t

Glass Rooster

15111511 views33 comments11 fav

ghosts of the previous owners who leave a trail of whispers

To See Who's There

15111511 views88 comments88 favs

Able to search through centuries, I click, scribble, skim,resurrect wet stone walls, the smell of burning peat.Bob's your uncle; Peggy's your aunt.Name your family, child. My brother said helloto Uncle Shirley and Aunt Greg. I was more…

Prelude to Pain

15111511 views00 comments00 favs

Grayson Warren is living the American Dream: a 15-year career as a city cop, a great wife and two kids. And then one day his dream turns into a nightmare.

young salesman

15111511 views44 comments11 fav

When I was young I bowed with such forgotten politeness, a young salesman, enchanting, in the silken trades. But I remembered the sun also when it was in Hades, which had forgotten to set, or to rise. Peace, also, dangled there by the neck. Such a pre

As the Bat Cave Turns

15111511 views55 comments44 favs

A study found that in bat species noted for female monogamy male bats have small testes and big brains, while in species noted for female promiscuity males have testicles five times as big, but smaller brains.

Zombies In The Time of Nineteen Eighty-Four

15111511 views00 comments00 favs

I was watching the bustling crowd below, sipping on a teacup full of Victory Gin when the scream, no a howl, cut through the murmuring of footsteps and telescreens.

Worry Is for the Well-Rested

15111511 views44 comments11 fav

I'm in the boardroom, downtown in San Francisco. I don't even remember showing up for work today. I hope they fire me, just like they fired Bill. Well not exactly like that, that was awful. He was caught downloading a phenomenal amount of…

surrogate

15111511 views33 comments11 fav

the vigilance that informs a parent's every hour had momentarily lapsed

###moth#7###

15111511 views22 comments22 favs

what was she like you ask? smarter than me for instance she could type alot faster. and she didn’t worry constantly about being poor or having a family looking over her shoulder. maybe that’s what she did with boys. 17 years later and she is in my bed

Ineluctable

15111511 views88 comments88 favs

I attended the burial of our affair when I found the notebook-maybe it should be called her diary-she had foolishly forgotten, leaving it on the deck of my beach house where she stayed while I was on that short trip to Chicago and I was numbed at first, unsure how to…

Downtown Milwaukee

15111511 views88 comments77 favs

Downtown Milwaukee My feet are exposed, never been out in public even out here— …

The Family Tradition

15111511 views00 comments00 favs

Your father, his father, and his before that, your mother, her mother, and all the way back have kept a tradition by chance or by will to each have a baby (or several) until…

Flash Before Your Eyes

15111511 views66 comments11 fav

It was the dead of winter. I took my father's shotgun from his closet. He kept it wrapped up in one of those khaki-colored gun tote bags that had a zipper running the whole length of the gun. It was a 16-gauge, single action shotgun. Anyone could tell wha

Our Last Night at the Nunnery Motel 2.0 in Milano

15101510 views99 comments66 favs

They make you work For your pizza in Italy You have to slice it yourself While wearing a gas mask To ward off the cigarette smoke From every neighboring table While chasing away the Mosquitos and the pigeons The flies and the gypsy r

Blind

15101510 views33 comments22 favs

a dim wood-paneled stair leading to the ladies’ rooms, candle-lit.

Five Million Yen: Chapter 48

15101510 views44 comments11 fav

Ben was not a happy musician.

1980, What I Wanted

15101510 views55 comments22 favs

Not to...Witness such sufferingWatch as a life fades awayReceive the callAttend this funeralBe surrounded by well meaning family and friendsStand by helplessly as my father sobs in his brother's armsNotice the pain settle in my brother's eyesSee my grandparents' tortured,…

Put Your Trust in God

15101510 views33 comments00 favs

God is my stomach.

Fragment from a Paper Story

15101510 views11 comment11 fav

While Leif was still very young, his emotions were very easy to read, for they appeared on his parchment coloured skin, named in his mother's writing. When he was seventeen, Leif fell in love. She was a pretty maid, one of the college servants who kept his…

Reasons to Live (RtL) = right to left

15101510 views99 comments88 favs

6. to register for the draft

Passings

15101510 views88 comments55 favs

Perhaps my grandparents, Fred and Lela, when they were growing up....

Waves of Memory

15101510 views33 comments22 favs

"Sometimes things just don’t go as planned. It doesn’t mean anyone is to blame - It just is."

391 Costume & personal appearance

15101510 views22 comments00 favs

I can’t deny you’re beautiful, though it’s unsure how many of your defects are fudged by my myopia.

The Sorry March to the Even Sorrier Sea

15101510 views88 comments33 favs

goes on and on. Like it's a sad mad season on Mars, well it isn't, is it? Sometimes I have towonder whatever happenedto us, to make us forget how well we already know how tosing as good as any larks do? I have never wantedto drown, but I've…

The Big LARP

15101510 views44 comments22 favs

The ambient sound wheezes on.

Burned

15101510 views77 comments33 favs

They called him “Albert, the Human Armadillo,” and he was. Rows of hard scales ran down the course of his chest, and he was studied and biopsied by doctor after doctor. “Psoriasis,” they said. “Or, eczema.” They prescribed ointments and oils that left him

Storm Chasers

15101510 views00 comments00 favs

“Okay,” I say, “but my point is the only way you’d ever know if someone really loved you is if they put their life on the line when it counts. Otherwise you gotta take their word for it.”