Most read stories

Frank Meets Francine

20262026 views1414 comments1212 favs

I interviewed in an hour and didn’t have an umbrella, so I ducked inside the next door I passed. It didn’t matter what they sold, I wasn’t there to make a purchase.

Hot Dish

20252025 views2121 comments1818 favs

Millie was a good woman, Bobby said. A good Christian woman. Well, I said, you can’t hold that against her.

Zurich, 1989

20252025 views1010 comments55 favs

I do not yet really understand the power I seem to have at this moment. And I am certainly too young to recognize that it will end up being weakness, too.

Making Love to God (or: A Profound Man)

20252025 views33 comments11 fav

"I would physically — not metaphorically, mind you — make love to that avocado..."

Amends '82: Part One

20252025 views00 comments00 favs

The kitchen I snuck out of seventeen years before kept fading to black and white, with this layer of something between me and them.

1987, What I wanted

20252025 views1212 comments55 favs

I wanted to watch, for as long as I could, until my innocence, like balloons, disappeared from view.

Flesh and Blood

20252025 views1515 comments77 favs

On Monday I cook coq au vin. Fatty yellow skin detached and floating in the sauce.

A Simple Misunderstanding

20242024 views11 comment00 favs

With such an attitude, it is remarkable that Jerome Quinth would be the one to make first contact with the beings from Lepton Six. As near as authorities could piece together from the charred remains, the historic event happened innocently enough on on

Some Kind of Compass

20242024 views2020 comments1919 favs

if we stare into the dark long enough, we see ourselves at some end or beginning –

The Bear (April Fool's Day Challenge)

20242024 views66 comments22 favs

Poor Daniel gets the ultimate trick played on him by nature when he encounters a bear for this April Fool's Day Challenge story.

Doreen - II

20242024 views2323 comments55 favs

I had the distinct feeling she was telepathic. As that thought crossed my mind, she smiled broadly and returned my quizzical stare. It caught me off guard, wasn't what I expected.

Of Cameramen and Death Squads in Tbilisi

20242024 views1313 comments1313 favs

we share somewhat the same past he was bureau chief of ABC overseas

A Girl More Still

20242024 views88 comments22 favs

Lena jumps in Tungi’s ride, a busted Cutlass with chrome wheels and booming stereo. She hugs him, presses her chichis against his. He’s wearing too much cologne, but Lena’s glad he’s trying.

I Am In Frequent Contact With You-Know-Who

20242024 views88 comments44 favs

"I am in frequent contact with you know who, and am able, most of the time, to surreptitiously send messages all day long every day, whenever I am inspired."

Why I am Afraid of Spiders

20232023 views1515 comments1111 favs

SPIDERS

The Arms of the Forest

20222022 views88 comments55 favs

Watch me sleep. Say I'm lovely, marbled-white. Pretend my forest is other to me. Pretend I am what you have made me. The sugar-almond starlet. Your virgin. Your treasure to break into. Believe me unconscious. It is you who are the dreamer. Look how those thorny…

Being Old is No Place for Sissies

20222022 views88 comments66 favs

My natural blonde hair is no longer sultry. Instead of a Dietrich look, I now assume a dead on impression of Bette Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" some mornings.

Dakota

20222022 views00 comments00 favs

I am warming up the Hotel Hugo courtesy shuttle van when Victor the front desk manager comes striding out waving his arms asking me why I haven't backed up yet. Victor says I'm always in my own world when I should be paying attention to the work at hand,

I Wrote a Book

20222022 views44 comments22 favs

About halfway through reading some book that was supposed to be some really deep shit, I decided to write my own book instead.

Without A Trace

20222022 views33 comments11 fav

There, at that cabin, she had first tasted the back of a hand in anger, the sting of a horsewhip, bone-deep fear and, finally, an unthinkable act of self defense.

Self Portrait as a Drowned Man

20212021 views66 comments66 favs

The light, oblique and waning, filters through butcher’s paper to reveal a body suspended in death but never decomposing.

A Knobby Thing

20212021 views2222 comments1010 favs

She feels ugly but ready for anything.

Don't Touch

20212021 views77 comments22 favs

Frank must have said "don't touch" about a million times over the course of the day

Raft of Worms

20202020 views1212 comments1111 favs

I learned to love what we had: the long, bright days, the water all around us, and even their slithery bodies, which somehow never dried under the pounding sun.

Check

20202020 views66 comments44 favs

When Quince came rolling up into my front yard that morning, we were up to our neck in August, staring down a seventh-grade year that had crept perilously close when we weren’t looking. I’m thirty-five years clear of it now, and I can still sense Texas on

'Introduction' to LETTING IT ALL HANG OUT

20202020 views00 comments00 favs

Was Sligo an unfeeling privacy-violator or an uncannily-feeling empath, privy to the deepest longings of those whose lives he came in contact with? [...] Sligo's grave is as silent as these pages ultimately would be if they were left unread.

Arcana Magi Cross - c.2

20202020 views00 comments00 favs

Ai noticed the red bead at the base of Tori’s neck embedded within the feather. It had the look of a ruby. She slid her hand over the bead and a tingling sensation climbed up her arm.

Home in Biloxi

20202020 views1010 comments33 favs

Her father stuffed years worth of stories into the phone, a sort of begging: how the new dog rode in the golf cart and retrieved lost Pinnacles; how the garage’s rent was too expensive; how the doctor gave him new pills and how he had lost weight and cu

ANNIES CHASE

20202020 views1010 comments11 fav

Annie remembers clearly the smell of that classroom, the look and taste of it. Thirty little cruel girls, as cruel as only girls can be, sitting in rows of five.

Berto and Cosi

20192019 views22 comments00 favs

Berto had come to live with me a month earlier. He’d been cursed by being the favored child of our parents. Their indulgence resulted in a 40 year old man and heroin addict from age 17 and all that accompanies such an existence such as thievery, larcen