“Your brain, your brain tries to make sense of things like this, specially life-threatening weird shit, so in my mind the grass was on fire and driving out swarms of invisible bees that were stinging us to death. Invisible killer bees. You don’t shoot be

One sunny day after Christmas Eldon went ice fishing with Grandma and Grandpa at Haymarsh. He was not fishing for Ice Fish but for regular fish who swam under the ice. Craig was there too. Craig was wearing more pairs of socks than anyone. He was wearing 3…

“The Boy from Thuringia” is part of a series of stories collectively called The History of Adoption. In it, a middle-aged man sets out rather obsessively to write a comprehensive history of the adopted child. In his attempts to finally begin this im

After surviving the first night in the hospital, I was put into a shared room to save on expenses, and to make room for the deluge of new cases that were coming in, and that was when I made friends with my roommate, Tommy. He was a boy about the sam

Five poets were beheaded that day, their heads rolled off the scaffold to the dirt and faced skywards; the heads were smiling

a world of probability against plague

No flinch, no stretch, no letting the cook get all golden about the chopping block.

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.

The Operations Management Guru was visiting the twenty-fourth floor on Tuesday, and everyone at the company was wicked with fear.

January 3rd EST/January 2nd PST 2002 It's 1:45 am or 10:45 pm depending on your philosophy about changing your watch when you fly. My plane is scheduled to land in San Francisco soon, but I'm completely disoriented because I've just had my first post-9/11 dream. …

Now, gazing into Greg’s expectant eyes, the only Chinese word Deepti could summon was kuei. Ghost. Before that summer, her mother flipped through the pages of Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir every day, as if she could glean magic from the touch of her finge

I'm sure someone somewhere must havefelt something like it before. Imean I've never been able tohave this kind of deep longing asif you might want to forget everythingyou know. I always figured that funny stuff onlyhappened to folks in a foreignfilm. Not to some guy…

“Why, you tell a story,” one young fellow said. The expression on his face said “How gauche, how passé!”

A dark girl, quite poor, maybe three, maybe four, leaned on a statue of a horse and his man. (The rider rode him in place, but as if in a race.) Her dress needed patching, her heart needed smoothing. She'd tried to sell…

lost in a taxi cab, 4:30 am