only after you slipped away entirely

I stood at a workbench for eight hours a day, scraping various shapes and bits of metal fresh from the machinist’s press, plotting my escape.

Michael shifted impatiently as his mom steadied the gyrocycle above the parking space. A rather blank, empty smile came over her face, and Michael understood. The Proctors were everywhere and where they weren’t, there was always a Neighbor who would be h

It’s hard to lose. Harder than you think. I guess the ultimate question is: If I had to give up one thing, my dog, or hazelnut gelato, which would it be? I’ll tell you, between those two, it would have been easy to choose. But losing you, that was a who

Nobody buying...

the Blue Ridge Mountains were entangled in their usual mist, but the early morning sky looked good

The bells are ringing once again. They are three sets of bells, but I can tell them apart. It's cold up here, and I never thought I would end up in such a high fortress surrounded by the grey and dark and the moat and the flora and fauna foreign and slightly brutish.…

All Karin did was watch from the street. No movement. No reaction. She just watched.

With nipples like those, rose-colored, we could have fed a nation!

Your insincere smile, eyes drowning in kohl. Sweat and sweet talcum, and the maroon cashmere stole.

You don't deserve this poem and I don't deserve to write it. Whatever time we have left is way better spent sitting in a sunny garden with a good interesting book and with a beautiful golden delicious apple to bite into. But…

"... A set of vertebrae disintegrate and a woman falls face first into her dinner plate."

I’ll give you a pair of grey cement pumps then into the river, your body I’ll dump.

While laying in his hospital bed recovering from a minor heart attack, Professor Martin Hellman reads details of an ancient book he has been given for translation--Biblos Melas, or, the "Black Book." Excerpted from the forthcoming novel "Minion Web."

We were so easy, so willing to be drained, that to start making those puffed-up stories about us now, our courage, etc. would be purely misleading. Put a bottle, or glass of wine in our hand, and our panties flew off, and gladly we would have followed y