Shakespeare was Shakespeare, after all, the greatest poet the language has ever boasted: why did Shakespeare’s contemporaries even bother with their paltry efforts?

Confused, I paused and locked eyes with the girl who’d just bounced it with the long, dark hair. “I just saw you with it.” She stared back at me. “Do you see it in my hands now?”

Matilda went wild at sixty-five. Legs left unshaven for the first time in fifty years, hair still and proud, knotted with forgetting. She’d roam the streets at night, a traveler without design. Matilda was a gardener of sorts, digging up all previous assu

I was in the kitchen peeling onions. They stung my eyes, and perhaps I was crying. I heard my dear husband run into the room and turned with the knife in my hand.

The lead man, who did not seem to be the most important or distinguished, just the one walking in line before all of the others, knocked twice on the door and opened it quickly. He stepped gingerly through the doorway and the others filed gloomily in afte

Del and I watched my brother toe his way to the edge of the cottonwood branch that arched over the reservoir.

We were to eat just meat and to become discombobulated over vegetables and bread and not to indulge in sex with strange men—men were all strange once you got used to their distance—were Lincoln logs, poles, boulders and scrub trees.

Your tongue is enlarging... wait, it’s growing hair. No, wait, it’s planarian flatworms, an earthy taste oozing down your throat. A terrible itching spreads from your solar plexus, under your skin everywhere. You know if you scratch even once, you won

...there is something quite delicious about the air between people strange to each other, something that makes my skin crackle alive with the possibility of touch...

I held on to the edge

The water burst into droplets of rain and fell on top of her. Chisame laughed out loud, a joy that overwhelmed her as she repeated this feat over and over.

She comes and goes,gingerly at times, or, caution tossed,a headlong rushof foam and froth.No matter, I am steadfast,keen to be immersed once morein her salty splendor.

Virginia hated herself for every moment she spent wondering what it would have been like if things had been different. How would her life be if Glen hadn’t been misdiagnosed, if he hadn’t died when she was a year married and four months pregnant? Not

When he turns around she has her top off and is climbing out of her skirt. "I don't like old men that much," she says. "We don't have to talk. No one will know."

My 99 year old mother...