Most read stories

Mona

21512151 views66 comments33 favs

Doc and I talked for several hours. When I told him Mona was pregnant, he turned his head and looked at me. “Who's the father?” he asked. Don't know, I said. Mona didn't know, either.

Smashed Idol

21512151 views99 comments66 favs

He was the kind of man that I would rather have declawed than date, and then leave him on a gurney, helpless and anaesthetized. Cliff Eames had made me feel that way since we were teenagers. He would never be helpless. …

Layers on a Cold Night

21512151 views88 comments22 favs

Later that night, he lay his shivering children in his own bed, the bed that betrayed and abandoned him just a few years ago. It will protect them now.

(From an Awakened Sleep)

21502150 views1010 comments1313 favs

pluck me from the charred grate

A Woman Who Watches

21502150 views1212 comments88 favs

She was a beautiful woman. I don't argue with that. I welcome it.

Wet funeral

21502150 views88 comments88 favs

I know now, how she moves without verbs after you crushed her into the river.

Good For The Ducks

21492149 views11 comment00 favs

It's dawn. It's quiet on the pond in the Public Garden. The light is calm, the pollution is mild, and everything is still,except for the occasional cruising taxi. It's the beginning of spring-- tulips out, leaves…

Hand and Thumb

21492149 views55 comments44 favs

Often we sit in silence and age. We are observers of dust, fashioning ourselves into antiques.

Catalog of Disappeared Things

21492149 views1616 comments1111 favs

He runs a mail-order business from a storefront and distributes a catalog of disappeared things.

People Called Our Windows Art

21492149 views55 comments88 favs

Mama hung them everywhere. It started with just a few, in our apartment and outside on the brick. She made walls into windows.

Wounded Knee

21492149 views11 comment11 fav

“They picked me up in their spaceship about noon,” Austin Grantham says to me while pulling up an apple crate to use as a stool.

Paris

21492149 views1515 comments77 favs

the boredom inherent in living in the suburbs

Tattooed Hands

21492149 views11 comment11 fav

A 1960’s of walking sugar beet fields to remove the rogue bolters by hand and on other days painting the ironwork of cattle sheds with red oxide. Then a 1970’s when the self-inking explosion of tattoos on his hands and then his body began.

The Illuminated Dream

21492149 views11 comment11 fav

It broke through the surface of the suburban world and shattered it into pieces, fragments of dreams and amazement. She was not the same as she had been a moment before. It was an epiphany she couldn't put her finger on.

How Elm Trees Die

21482148 views3030 comments1313 favs

I had felt suddenly lighter and next thing I knew I was watching Leonard Tucker and Sister William from somewhere near the ceiling. I saw myself, too, at my desk, holding my songbook out in front of me like everyone else.

Disorienteering

21482148 views00 comments00 favs

At night, on these New England roads, there is no light, no pink sodium-vapor glow, no guideposts.

When I Met Ian Curtis

21482148 views99 comments66 favs

Okay, no freaking out. I mean, this isn't a suicide note. This is suicide fiction.

The Intercom

21462146 views33 comments11 fav

I have never met Joe’s brother, of course.

Epithelial Sample

21462146 views99 comments55 favs

I found my black dot nucleus. School got me in the 10th year with the numbers spilling outta my head, but now I got the cell on my mind. Everybody's floating around this joint all pink and green college clean, yellow face Japanese, or the jet-headed Greeks with their…

The winter I was going to meetings

21462146 views66 comments22 favs

It’ll die in there and the stairwell’ll stink for weeks, Greg says in the car. We’re quiet, considering that.

Quiet City

21462146 views66 comments66 favs

I hope you'll have the time to read this before your attention wanders.

Cremains

21462146 views1313 comments1010 favs

I need a different storage solution

Flying Tiger

21462146 views1919 comments99 favs

I screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked him if he had shot down any Japanese airplanes. He grinned at me. “One,” he said.

Cupcake Footprint

21462146 views55 comments00 favs

once wedding cake under pillows. now fluffy frosting on squashed defeat

Sociopathic Medicine

21462146 views11 comment11 fav

True love may last forever, but the most I've ever gotten out of a lab assistant is two years, five months, three weeks, twelve days, and fifteen hours. And he was the exception.

Tomorrows Never Written and Subsequent Unrehearsed Memory

21452145 views66 comments33 favs

For some, a vertical pattern will evoke prison bars, for others, product bar codes.

Bring Me His Head

21452145 views2020 comments1616 favs

Just bring me his head, that cerebral kiln of hot, ruddy verbiage and cadence.

Optical Delusion

21442144 views2424 comments1616 favs

Veiled by tenuous clouds and dirty air,

Please

21442144 views1414 comments44 favs

"What I need to wear the ring for," I said to myself, "I already got his last name..."

What She Left Unsaid

21442144 views88 comments77 favs

Megan beat up on herself later over the unsaid.