The kitchen faucet he’d kept saying he’d “get to” continued its plunk, plunk, plunk into the aluminum sink. His idea.…
On the August night her husband died Marie, too, had slept like the dead. “How ironic?” mourners said at the…
Gerry the tailor sat in his workshop steadily sewing. He was patching an old overcoat. His bright needle flashed like…
Scanlon, two years older than me, had good movement on his curve. It dove inside toward my feet and I…
The ring isn’t enough. We lie in the afterglow and she says the distance is what kills her. The answer…
He wondered if anyone had noticed his thinning, the sharpening of hips and crescent-bones beneath his eyes. He heard: You…
An empty woman seated on a park bench, I sat checking out people on their morning walks. You moseyed on…
Her antique gold Old Gringo Sora cowgirl boots cost $560.Brass brown with bright floral embroidery Hand-stitched. Luscious goat leather. I…
There is a place I know of. A quiet place. Full of life and luster and all the things worth…
She could smell him, lupine musk marking every branch, every leaf, every inch of the ground. It turned her stomach,…
I was amazed by your minimal efforts to find something of value. We have that in common, I suppose. There was…
We sit on your porch with a Battlestar Galactica lunchbox between us. In the lunchbox, a dead orange kitten. Atop…
Grandpa moved like a clockwork soldier at times, especially in winter. He said it was the shrapnel he got in…
The restaurant had lice. I first noticed this when one fell onto my arm and skittered across my arm hair,…
Our father used to say we were forged by the fist. Claimed we were descended from the bare-knuckle pugilist Captain…
At this moment, forces are aligning against you, all those devils that keep you up at night. So you get…
She nearly ripped off my eyelashes with one good yank of the daisy top sheet. “What in the world is…
The man with the pinkie rings is in charge. “Gather round,” he said, “I want to tell you something. I…
I was standing in a car. A car on a train. A train like Metra’s North Line to Kenosha. And…
From the corner of my eye, I saw the whole thing happen. She bumped her elbow, and it tipped out…
One night, Death visits my mother. She opens the backdoor and lets him into the kitchen. It’s raining outside, and…
“It wasn’t me what set fire to it, and you’d see that plain as day if you only just looked…
From his basement prison, Clayton heard his captor cheerfully greeting trick or treaters. He thought of screaming for help, but…
It had been two days so we were getting pretty hungry. I couldn’t move anything except my head but my…
Her hand is at the window, moves the curtain, she is waiting. She tries to read. Her eyes move over…
She’s so pretty, and I’m falling for her, but I’m such a severe codependent that I never know if my…
She wrote in shafts of sunlight striking the scrubbed white wood of the old kitchen table. Head bent over her…
It was Mercedes Benz fashion week in New York City, and Hans was running late. His sister Greta was already…
“K.R. Lochan,” Indu exclaimed, leaning toward her friend. The flower she'd tucked behind her ear fell into the dirt. “When…
My cousin Margaret would not stop singing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” We sat cross-legged in her family’s basement rec…
I'm reading about the vehicle accident in The Great Gatsby, when Mama steps on the brakes. In the screeching seconds,…
On the third slam the door finally flew open. Frank nearly fell over himself rushing into the hotel room. He…
“How much time do I have?” Horace asks from his hospital bed, turning to a woman sitting at his bedside…
The grasshopper lady handed me an insect. “It’s a grasshopper,” she said. “Schistocerca americana.” The creature—leathery, angular—perched on my palm, its body…
Everyone thought my grandfather was a saint behind his white-toothed smile as sweet as butterscotch pie. He took his dog…
She hates it. Still. Thick and purple, two years on. Where they went in. Sliced away the bulk of her…
Old Pete pulls out his pocket knife, picks up a stick, and sits on an upside down bucket. Johnny tells…
Lily catches a glimpse of herself in the lobby mirror just to the right of the long crack midway of…
A waft of Nag Champa incense met Cecilia at the door of AJ’s Market. Hindus. Butlerville had changed forever when…
The power went out around ten in the morning that Saturday. Later, pea-sized hail thrashed the tiny leaves off the…
Clint loves computers and technology, although the latest computer virus is awful. Not only does it infect computers it can…
Named for the greatest of his great grandfathers, a king who earned his land by blood and bravery, Malakeye stood…
After she returned home, she spent a lot of time thinking about it. Her life wasn’t that filled up, to…
When I finally confronted my mother about the scant thirteen months between my older sister’s birth and mine, my goal…
That rainy afternoon, behind foggy storefront windows, wheels of aged cheese sweated a smell so intoxicating that it made them…
Chrissie waited. She was bored, she was tired, she was busy trying to put herself into another time and place.…
Nina never thought she'd be throwing Nick overboard. After all, he had always been a great sailor, always sure-footed on…
Nigger, please, you and your payday smile. You shine like you got new shoes, an ear full of good news,…
Cold leaves crunched beneath my bare feet as I walked slowly through the forest, waiting for it to happen. The…
It started simply. In a Delaware public school, the principal walked into the lunch room and told the students that…
"Should we call the police?" Ted Strickland, thick midsection, thinning blond hair, had discovered his daughter, Jessica's bed unslept in…
Sari yelled at her boys and later felt bad about it. After all, people say “boys will be boys” and…
“It snatched a dog two days ago, in Drapers Fields” Detective Constable Habib explained back at the station to her…
John woke to a flare-up of rheumatoid and the smell of Irene’s homemade cinnamon rolls. His wife’s kindness didn’t go…
The clown was a big hit! Danny, the birthday boy, laughed the hardest at his antics. Joe, Danny’s father, didn’t…
“Excuse me for being personal, but that’s a handsome tattoo on your arm.” “Thank you. Have you decided what you’re…
“Imagine you’ve got this epic space battle,” she said. “But, instead of galactic military forces with missiles, phasers and bombs,…
With the stature of a tin soldier granted life, he walked with purpose through the dark, snowy streets, his shoulders…
His lips moved perceptibly, silently, then broke a faint, brittle smile at the quotation from Carl Linnaeus in the manuscript…
Still half asleep, I look to see if I need to fill the bird feeders before going to work and…
Sheila wasn’t really missing. Frank never hurt her, really, but didn’t want to be alone. He reckoned if he knew…
“My grandson wants me to get that damn implant.” We sat in the courtyard under a sun that dried my…
My head thuds like wet clothes in a dryer. Thud, thud, and thud again. Before I can do anything, I…
“What do you think of Latin Jazz?” I throw him that question as a rope because he’s off balance and…
She struggled with the escaping the sun in the afternoon. All the time she spent trying to leave behind the…
We bow our heads, certain that this moment, wait, this one right now, is the right one. This is the…
So how important was the ring? His heart was 100% committed, but his pocketbook—their pocketbook—could barely cover the cost of…
The crickets in the backyard were chirping loudly as Clark spotted Billy approaching. His right hand full with a pair…
“I could, you know, be persuaded.” We’ve progressed from strangers in a library to even stranger human beings considering sex.…
As of 1955, Alta Dena didn't deliver milk in Orange County, California as supermarkets were satisfying demand. Kurt's father insisted…
. . . The marriage? . . . Oh, well, since you ask about the marriage— Early on there was…
She collided into him. An accident, she later confessed, a glint in her eye, a little lie. They flew down…
Dressed in their yellow flight jumpsuit, Koob was camouflaged as they rode the matching escalator to the tenth floor. Gray…
Fat rolls ring the back of the old man’s head in front of me. On the round of the rolls,…
There’s a planet just like ours. But nothing like ours. Regis-132 is fourteen hundred light years away. Or so. And…
“Is this your granddaughter?” I heard the aide speaking from across the room, but I could barely make out where…
After 9/11, Amanda said that she bet airline security was going to get tighter. She looked all the way around…
The man on the hill had long wooden hair and a hollow face with white eyes not meant for seeing.…
And then the bulldozer stopped. The men and the women stepped slowly away from their vehicles. The jungles crept closer…
In sleep, the war vet covers the distance from his Ohio bedroom to the jungle he patrolled in three heartbeats.…
Mary from next-door keeps her hair grey and wears it loose. Every spring she starts a tomato garden in her…
There are those tiny almost imperceptible moments, barely at the edge of awareness, upon which the whole world turns. If…
Dawn lurched forward slightly, her kidneys aching from the constant drumming against her lower back. It was only 45 minutes…
“No one wants to clown anymore.” Loomey the clown said after he had taken a pull from a bottle of…
Shit and spit, puppy dog tails and slimy snails. Six lazy-ass brothers and who gets stuck delivering broth and bread,…
He watches his daughter kiss her boyfriend, then sighs loudly. She gives her father a cold glare. He lifts his…
A wave of anticipation and excitement emotionally washed over me when we made the ten hour drive for a post-holiday…
*Companion song inspired by this story, written and sung by the author. My best friend Kenny: a year older and…
The Unimaginable wakes in a dense purple dawn after an uneasy sleep. He sits up in the ancient oak bed,…
It's cold out when I reach a position away from street lights, walking the bike trail alongside the Great Miami…
“Hope is not a strategy.” ... Sarah Palin Billip approached her house the way a horse approaches an oblivion-haha. He had…
Wage slave’s emancipation night, millworkers, cannery workers, and dock workers with sales clerks, maids, seamstresses, hookers, and pimps and whores,…
“Call it.” “6:23 p.m.” “Shit,” he said. “Shit.” The room looked at the surgeon in horror. His hands were full…
October 27, 1962, 10:15AM I hang up the phone. I turn and watch my mother making coffee and toast. She…
"Hello Joe," she said as he entered the grubby little apartment. Closing the door behind him, Joe stood in front…
I admit it. I am more than a skeptic. I am a naysayer. I do not believe in guardian angels.…
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