At home, my neighbor's spouse is slowly dying. Eleanor and Milton, Milton is the dying one. Though I suppose that one of them is not really dying much more than...
Phil opened his eyes to see glass just inches from his face. He looked left, then right. He rotated his eyeballs three hundred-sixty degrees. He saw glass in al...
“The giants of old San Juan grabbed the boys by the ankles and swung them to smash open the piñatas. With the boys out of the way, the girls calmly gathered the...
Fans scream and dance as the pop-punk/emo-punk/emo-pop band, Pluto’s No More, plays up on stage in front of them. Consisting of five members, theirs is a group ...
When I was little, I'd point at the sky and ask Mama if I could have that cotton candy fluff. Sometimes white, sometimes pink, and occasionally orange, they'd c...
On late night after a track meet, and coincidentally a Royals game, my friends and I went on a run to IHOP—the only restaurant still open at 11:30 PM. As we sta...
The bugs in Castor’s head writhed beneath his skull. He threw his burner at the rock-covered ground and screamed, his strained voice reverberating across the la...
“When I got back to my car I was like, wait… if I didn’t have a boyfriend, were we about to kiss?”
Carissa hadn’t planned on telling any of her friends back ...
Thank you for sending along the house inspection report. I’m sorry it’s taken so long for me to respond. My ex-wife and I had to discuss it, which took more ene...
One hungover morning wasn’t that different from any other hungover morning. At least that’s what Leslie like to tell herself. She struggled out of bed as her al...
For nearly every night of the past year, Simon Page has stumbled, half-blind and terrified, through the morphing liquid maze of horrors that are his chronic nig...
Marlene didn’t know a lot of things, but she knew enough. She knew an average number of things to an average degree of knowledgeability. If you fall asleep befo...
Something was wrong with Mr. Fleeter.
He was usually so approachable, happy to talk with anyone. Unlike other teachers who struggled to connect with student...
“Don’t move, OK?”
“OK.”
Agh.
Couldn’t she just put it on the stupid countertop? Spices do smell good, though.
I need to shower, clean Harley’s ear, ...
Your third-highest-grossing film got shit reviews.
You shouldn’t be surprised, really: It’s just another day of doing exactly what it was you said you wanted...
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...