Your grandmother had written it down on a blue note card she must have kept in her old mahogany secretary desk. You remember the desk because of the way its wri...
No, she said, it has to be deeper. If I go much deeper, he said, we’ll hit a water main or something. So you hit one, she said, and then we course-correct. But ...
You say that you love New York, and fine, I won’t disabuse you of that notion, all I’ll say is that while you were flying business class into JFK and staying in...
Every week in group therapy we are encouraged to share what is generally referred to as life experience. The idea is to diffuse individual psychoneurotic suffer...
The Wikipedia page for Hopscotch will tell you that the game was invented in prehistoric India, dating some time between 600 and 500 BCE. Time counted down, bac...
Your lost keys glisten on a plinth near the entrance. You remember the 1992 Dodge Neon that these belonged to, and how the entire car felt hollow and plastic an...
When Meg first walks into a thrift store, a question automatically pricks the back of her mind. How is she gonna drink out of something that comes from a place ...
Her face will be all over the news: concealer hastily dabbed around black-hole eyes, caffeine patch glue curling leg- and arm-hairs like pill bugs, fingerprints...
May
I felt a queasy foreboding when the blackout hit. Cell and internet service were down too. My wife Mary, a librarian, a devout optimist, took it in strid...
I paid the cops once they were done with the hobo on the trampoline. I said, while I was paying them, can you believe this? In this neighborhood? A hobo? And th...
Fred had routines. They were always there—routines and habits, all in a particular order, and a part of everything Fred knew. His routines could be listed easil...
She wakes up at three.
She wakes her daughter up shortly thereafter.
She showers.
She makes her daughter a light breakfast.
She drives them both to ...
Shoshona got her period the day after the Fallbrook Fire erupted east of Highway 15 and incinerated hundreds of acres of pot and palm tree farms. Her boyfriend ...
I. Midnight Premonition
I wake up in a dark room to the sound of a blade cutting the wash of traffic outside. My body completely wet. It feels like I’m going...
A young man, Hippolytus, and a young woman, Pip, sit on a ring around Saturn. Stars shoot all around, no sounds but for Hippolytus and Pip talking.
H...
Growing out of adolescence was like emerging from a dense fog.
You breathe better, the things around you become easier to identify. You retain the shape of t...
In my movie, I am a girl walking alone on a subway platform. The dark corners imply gruff hands, sandpaper fingers threatening to wring me out and dump me on th...
A handsome, heartthrob archaeologist flashes a million-dollar smile, flashes a lightning-quick whip, flashes well-tanned pectorals in the gap of his buttoned-do...
I don’t know her personally. Only from the two-and-a-half hours of Facebook stalking, I had done the night before. And— of course— I forgot to put deodorant on ...
Does she live alone, across the hallway from you, and does your daughter call her a witch? While giggling, and after you scold her, in whispers, to her frie...
I had this mask, smelled terrible–put it on and it was like you were pulling yourself through a wormhole to some sort of hot, rotting planet. Great look though...
So the damn dog’s sinking, cramp in its hind legs, head going under, and there’s me in my yellow jumpsuit with shoulder pads, a medallist swimmer, and yes I cou...
T’was the night we were on the loose, and Joey believed he could charm our way into Talk of the Town.
He’d done it before, he said, with a fake ID his cousin...
I have a can of ashes. It is all that is left of my parents.
They want taken to some faraway place, some hippy-dippy part of the world, some beach in Fiji. S...
I try not to clear my throat in public, but accidents happen. It was winter. I had a cold. I stifled the bodily noise with my palm, but a guy a table away still...
Plot twists aren't the only measure of a life well lived but they might be the best one, Tyler concludes after many idle hours pondering the wild but moderately...
The scene looks like a Caravaggio portrait, shaded in chiaroscuro from the streetlamp above. The Preacher stands on a flipped-over milk crate at the corner of P...
“Darkness Falls, Jaws, The Ring, Scream, The Grudge, Halloween, Halloween II, Halloween III: the Season of the Witch, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers,...
The Friday when rent was due, Katelyn moved out. It took one trip with her Geo. She took pride in her entire life residing in a duffel bag, safe, and gray tote ...