Robert’s right eye was noticeably larger than his left, and he exhibited a polite reserve that was sweet at first but grating over time. He was thirty-seven yea...
“The tricky thing about telepathy is understanding what you hear,” Marco said. “People’s thoughts aren’t neatly ordered, Alice, they, the thoughts I mean, they ...
Falling down the stairs is no joke. The need for a minivan full of pills to numb the nonstop pain is worse. And why are the tablets always made beside nightclub...
It was my idea to crack open the last bottle of tequila, the one with no label on it, just the word tequila scrawled across it in red Sharpie. A survivor from s...
The rehearsal space smells like dust and burnt wires and lemon cleaner. My boyfriend says it smells like success. My boyfriend also plays lead guitar bought by ...
Well done, scientific community. We have achieved something truly incredible today. Emotion, once thought to be solely the purview of humankind, can now be expe...
An Excerpt from Ornery Cuss
I.
I left in the late morning, after my mom went to work. We'd had an argument before hand and she said things she could n...
1. Forget Your Name
Usually they get professionals or singers or celebrities to do this kind of thing, but today they’ve chosen you. You become this sort of ...
I. Emma Stone clipping toenails
We hear Emma clipping her toenails: a hesitant, musical sound.
EMMA: Emma Stone… clipping… toenails.
So weird. When I cli...
He stamped the paper with the authority of someone who knew the stamp meant nothing. The man passed the paper to me. I folded it four times and placed it in my ...
Martin is sadistic toward the spiders in the corner. He taunts them with glass jars, with paper towels. He gets them to crawl, slow, cautious, onto the paper an...
“It can’t always be a full moon. It mostly ever isn’t a full moon,” I said to the sky as I looked out from the Ferris wheel into the smug face on the full moon ...
6:00 A.M., and the little bastards arrived right on time. There must have been at least fifty of these tiny intellectuals. Breakfast always started at six, and ...
Hank’s mood had little to do with the pain of recovering from his vasectomy.
“I just didn’t like the joke,” he said.
Evan was already laughing, having tho...
“Fuck off,” Omar whispered, biting his cuticle until it bled.
He looked out the window from his fourteenth-floor Manhattan apartment. Fifth Avenue was swarm...
It’s 9:02 pm. The stars are awake. My intestines are as if interstates and the Taglioni is swerving like a motherfucker. I’ve vomited on this rooftop bar, and m...
“Is my boyfriend going to leave me?”
The girl asks it the way people ask about a menu item that’s clearly explained—like she already knows the answer and jus...
You’re a writer, and you’re telling a friend of yours about this story you’re planning to write. Your friend’s also a writer, but that’s not really why you’re t...
At the time I was thirty-seven, divorced, and telling people I didn’t want children. I knew that line by heart. The possum started as an accessory. Black dresse...
“Wouldn’t it be funny if we got married?”
Daniel’s fingers drummed a nervous percussion on the steering wheel, a rhythm that had started miles ago and hadn’t s...
i. damp pavement soaks through my four year-old gym shoes– they graduated before I did. while the droplets precipitate from whatever cumulus nimbus reigns acros...
The road went on forever, until it shrunk and trapped us in. Jason’s truck maneuvered through the vast and winding roads of Central Jersey. People say that Cent...
The UH-60 Crash Hawks chopped out a sound so deafening it offended god. In our headsets our pilot switched on Dream Theater’s Pull Me Under to drone out the bla...
Fatty Carbonara (he wasn’t fat, that just happened to be his name) stepped out of the shower bright and early one morning to find a little heap of dark green le...
Nine days before they uncovered the bodies, I watched Silvia Esposito perform her family’s late August ritual. In a one-piece Wonder Woman swimsuit, she stompe...
Poor boarding school boy Gil Freeman awakes after a long horrible night spent in a tired and dreary Scottish hospital. He is alone in the desolation of the mind...
I’m in the kitchen. Swanson is locked in the cellar. He can’t be trusted. He cries fake tears and tells me his wife and kid must be worried sick. A wreck, he sa...
For some reason, I felt better after a beer for breakfast. Bacon helped. Eggs, too. What didn’t was the seven-foot-tall AI nightmare glaring at me from the corn...