She told me it had been there since she was a kid, this large black spot like a blimp floating from her right arm up to the tip of her neck. She had really pale skin so she kinda looked like a cow strutting down the street.

She approached him submissively, face down, eyes hidden by hair that moved with every shift of the current.

Other pathways are more satisfactory. They are more closely attuned to music of the other world. Even so, the heat eventually burns them up.

I texted a wickety-split, tax-declaring New York-based international escort, a moonlighting, all-pro Kit, whose day job on Wall Street yields no bonus.

He met her at midnight just off the plane and they sized each other with silent growing awareness that no matter what might transpire in distant tomorrows, each served here now as passports to magic and lands far away. On the…

They are kind of cool though I’ll admit…pretty types with perfect angles and poise and judicial daddies and shade tree homes, holding their books preciously against their tight bodies as if they’re into academics or something.

While the shadows of lives that once were still hid away, others who survived tried to stand on their own two feet and walk the distance again and tell what happened and what it was all like.

In the black not dead of night, she gathers them; slowly,diligently placing the cansand bottles into two large plasticbags strung across a long piece of wood; this is her money work. She is small, but her bodyhas the choreography down:sift, search, lift,…

That’s not just a trinket on her finger, that’s a rock, a fortress, a castle. No one can scale those walls except Joe Sixpack, slumped beside her at the airport. They’re not a match. I give it 5 years, max. Not even. Joe

Every spring, outside on the back deck, my mother and I have the same talk about how time flies, and she always waves her hand in the air as if swatting at a fly, but there's never anything there. She thinks the lilies will live all summer spread like a rainbow,…

“Miss Brown had spent the morning (was it just this morning? Or another?) purchasing parsnips and leafy green vegetables from the local grocers, when she was overcome by a wave of nausea. The world went black and she awoke in a windowless, doorless room.

“Don’t you think you should tie a tourniquet or something?” she asked as I bled profusely from the points where Jesus was wounded during his crucifixion.

We construct what we want, from what has failed in the past. We thought this worked. The picture was buzzing for me and I tried to hold on. I went blindly forward.

He trudged up the steep, antique, spiral staircase to his study. Many hours had been spent in the sanctuary of this room, studying, praying, sleeping; however, now his intentions were much different.

We drank beer and played loose pool, attracted two fun girls, one Jamaican, the other dirty blonde, both of whom seemed interested in only one of the four of us.