If you don't know what you're getting into maybe you shouldn't take the job. Driving in the rain with the windows open, holding your breath for minutes at a time, sticking your head out to gasp for air, you begin to understand the depravity to which people in poverty…

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

In every word there is both music and history. Music from the way sounds come into union with each other, and history in how they get there. There is form too, sure, but I am not a calligrapher. I'm a scribbler if anything. And so my sentences look mo

Emi was cheerful and nice towards her classmates. It was like she saw a different person last night. Emi’s pupil-less red eyes frightened her, and the spell that she cast on her, that bump on the head still lingered.

It would wander the hallways after the 3:45 bell, after the last class, after the students had all disappeared with the homework they'd never finish, the papers they'd forget to write, after Nate the janitor pushed his broom through the endless doorways,

People go through life all the time with only one kidney, or with some of their female-parts removed.

We sat all in a muffledlittle line up, on theconcrete lips of tomorrow'ssleepy chin, like all the world's good little children should, as the paradelimped itself slowly by, slapping itself against the young day'sexcitement like a damaged flattire, trying its…

If it were known that I am as stupid as I am, if the press were to open that page on TV, if the laughter shot itself like fireworks out into the road--

Since Patty got the lumpectomy, she won’t sleep with anyone but Cal, because he was the one who went with her to the hospital and wasn’t surprised when he saw the scar.

Sitting at an outside table at the Bassett Café on West Broadway, I remember, in the background always the Twin Towers behind me in the photographs from that time And the sparrows in New York, bolder than anywhere working over the scrap

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.

I laugh too loud cause the world looks good that way and for a minute we both make funny sounds just to exercise our vocal cords and see how close we can come to the line without crossing.

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.

“You buy shit, it’s gonna smell like shit,” he said. “You should’ve come to me like I told you and got a good deal with my nephew.”

She did not know what it would feel like, how it would happen … but she knew it would be done. She knew that it would be magical, like nothing she could see or hear through the cornfields or around the markets.