Most recent stories

Fall Apart Stuff

16221622 views55 comments66 favs

He is snoring inside the silo of his throat. The inside there shines golden but that’s not the truth. There is something caught below the gold.

Proust's Moustache

20812081 views1010 comments66 favs

My brother and I had often debated whether we could get our father to shave his moustache off, just to see if his sophistication remained intact without it.

The Best Interest of the Child

15851585 views77 comments55 favs

He was here and then he was gone. He wasn't at my ex-wife's house either. On Tuesday we were at the circus and that's the last I saw him. I jumped into my '68 Beetle, one step above a clown car, and I stopped by The Big Top. The carnies were there, smoking cigarettes and…

Untitled

11571157 views11 comment00 favs

What else, H, is there to say about heartbreak? What else could it be but our hands, cupped as if holding water against our chests, then broken into halves. Or the picture of this one, pretending to load a gun. Or this one, soaked in smoke—asking for

Her Smile

949949 views33 comments11 fav

The white and yellow are sublime and desperately powerful, like angry screaming over tears and through laughter or hatred. Maybe the words are about crying or laughing, but the expressions are altogether impenetrable and distant. The jokes told behind the teeth and through…

Disappearing

835835 views11 comment00 favs

They say nothing, but instead watch the birds and people hovering. Every day is an echo of the one before, and the weight of waiting has begun to show itself in the stature of the tiny man and his little old wife. …

Old, Broken Toys

827827 views11 comment00 favs

A boy sits in a room filled with old, broken toys. A mother is in the next room reading Cosmopolitan, dreaming of a life that should have been hers. There is the zoo and an unnecessary stroller on a very humid day, beads of sweat dripping slowly down a face. A trip to the…

Could Be

871871 views11 comment11 fav

Years later, the couple is different in some terribly profound way. Maybe they have grown old and begun to look like one another. Or maybe they have been divorced and haven't spoken in months or years except through the kids, who they spoil and use against their…

The Continuous City

10241024 views55 comments22 favs

The night sky was washed gray by city lights.

Starting from Scratch

11281128 views33 comments22 favs

Each time his eyes closed, he shook off the sleep, whimpered, and opened them wide again. I’d never watched a baby fall asleep before, but I realized at that time that falling asleep could be a scary thing. The world gets fuzzy and starts slipping awa

LATE NIGHT WITH MANDELBROT

12181218 views44 comments55 favs

On Soapography, two actresses are discussing everyone’s personal heaven, and in another room you can hear a woman who is your dead mother combing her hair in a doctor’s smock in a dream,

All Her Ribbons

19931993 views1313 comments99 favs

She was always last.

Chinese Apples

21242124 views77 comments99 favs

Mother still calls pomegranates “Chinese apples,” much to my embarrassment.

Mermaids Need Other Mermaids

14211421 views22 comments22 favs

Pauleen tries to split open her legs because she doesn’t understand how to love someone without them.

Seishin

17191719 views33 comments11 fav

The Japanese sun, blood-red and vibrant, like a Cézanne apple, was setting far away in the distance over the snow-capped peak of Mt. Fuji. For a moment, the intensity of the light blinded him. He could not see the road ahead. His front bicycle wheel wobb

Gummi Worms, Love, etc.

989989 views22 comments11 fav

It was R who embodied love for me. We’d eaten gummi worms in the park, held them up to the sun, yellow and green and translucent. When we returned to her flat, they were everywhere. I’d never seen such a thing. They hung in the air, these gummi worms.

The Right to Privacy

811811 views11 comment00 favs

Every day, I come home from work and hear you two screaming next door, breaking dishes and furniture and sometimes each other while your toddler wails. And if I can't drown it out with the TV and a beer, I stuff in the earbuds and crank up the iPod, too. That way, I…

Rejected York Peppermint Pattie Commercial Blurbs

12271227 views44 comments11 fav

When I bite into a York Peppermint Pattie, I get the sensation of being curled in a ball inside a cold, dark cave filled with my darkest, most paralyzing fears.

Elegy for the Sun

910910 views00 comments00 favs

When winter comes again…

Wild Dreams of Reality, 2

18831883 views00 comments00 favs

All of a sudden I felt a hand on my neck. I jumped up from my chair and turned to face my brother Darrell, with his surprisingly white shock of hair, the result of all the drugs he'd been experimenting with, back in his mid-twenties. He was even taller

Nell

11471147 views11 comment00 favs

Was it hope or despair that drove her to walk out the door of the place she had called home for the past twenty years? Did she feel sorrow or relief to leave behind a husband and five children?

Lunch, daily.

906906 views11 comment00 favs

She’s not settling. She can learn to like this.

The Shreds of Flame

10731073 views00 comments00 favs

For years I watched behind the glass While merry parties purpled past But now the world’s a Solemn Mass And I can only think.

Water for Old Bet

13031303 views00 comments00 favs

Why, I tell you, one run through that song, I’m always about to find my way out. But if this happens just two more times now, I tell you, I am going to go out and start something. You can’t treat a man like this. Even if he is smaller, like me. Why, I

Soap

17671767 views2323 comments1313 favs

Jackson's a chocolate lab. I brought him home from the no-kill this morning. I've always wanted a dog, but I did it more for Wylie. We stand under the willow with the water running out the hose, Jackson, Wylie and I. Dandelions cover the…

Dump like no other.

10751075 views11 comment22 favs

Their dump was like no other in the country. It was bigger than the rest. And, unlike their innumerable competitors, this dump—which sat packed with trash on the surf of an ocean—was organized with care.The Elks took pride in their dump. Three…

Eclipse

16411641 views22 comments11 fav

On the first day of autumn, in the rear courtyard of the Léger estate, Yvette Mongrain was scrubbing down the glass tables and wrought iron chairs that had been trucked in from Paris the morning before and arranged across the flagstones.

It Is Enough

15591559 views22 comments22 favs

I don't know what my mother is thinking. She's either cart wheeling into crazy land or turning into a ghoul.

Roommate, 2006

831831 views00 comments00 favs

I love her now, but I used hate her because she’d leave hairs on my bar of soap.

Wild Dreams of Reality, Chapter 1

21002100 views33 comments11 fav

I became a fool for Adrienne Parker the first moment I set eyes on her. Whenever Parker walked into Oliveira's Cafe my breath would stop. I'd try turning away, then find my gaze locked on her face. Maybe it was her bare arms that I found so appealing