A New Kind of Literary Pulse

I was chasing my little brother through the park at dusk. The whole park was filled with restless families waiting for the fireworks to start. My brother halted in his grass-stained diaper. "God ... [+]

When we awoke, we found a great curtain of linked metal rungs had been lowered to earth from the sky. The chain mail drape connected land and sky and ran as far the eye could see, across the ocean ... [+]

With a fresh kill in tow, the hunter made his way back to camp through the snow-covered forest. The weight of the stag labored his every step. A cold snap hit. Sharp, biting winds whipped icy ... [+]

It came to him suddenly, as he ran down the street screaming and on fire, that he was making a spectacle of himself.
After all, this was a modest neighborhood of well-maintained lawns and sensible ... [+]

I never thought I would end up like this – like a tabloid horror story. Someday I bet I'll be discovered dead, here in my tiny, piss-scented apartment, being devoured by my seventy cats.
Thing ... [+]

She waited for almost two days before calling the police. Even though she knew in the pit of her stomach that something was terribly wrong – her husband had never gone a single day without talking ... [+]

A witch wind was howling out in the desert. I was praying for a storm to scour Coaling Depot 6 down to the ground, wipe it right off the Arizona Territory map. Apart from prayer, I still had a shot ... [+]

The second house on the left. If the door is blue, you're welcome. Red, you've come too early. Green, too late.
The meaningless chant comes to me whole. I can't remember where I've heard it, but ... [+]

"I killed a man before, you know."
It's 3:12 pm, an awkward time for us to be preparing food. I'm not sure if we're making a late lunch, an early dinner, or just afternoon tea. I've been ... [+]

Randall stood before his bathroom mirror – gazing at the enormous, glistening dome that was his head. Creams, lotions, infused oils, battery-powered skull caps; he had deployed them all in his ... [+]

My husband's nose changed first—a nearly imperceptible spot-the-difference puzzle on a face I'd known for twenty-two years. Through our kitchen's bay windows, the morning sunlight highlighted his ... [+]

A woman who claimed to be a chimera called the library most Tuesdays, on the old line they never got around to disconnecting after the renovations. The call went straight to a yellowed phone hung on ... [+]

"You're in New England," the man in front of me said with a British accent, so my mind—which I knew was not running completely clearly—assumed he meant that we both were in a new version of ... [+]

January 26, 1906
Forty-seven days have passed and the bananas in my kitchen are still green. They remain untouched and unmoved since I brought them home from market. To my eye they appea ... [+]

"It's an old building," Becky said, when Peter asked her.
"Do you get them in your apartment, too?"
She'd given him a look, then, as if she thought he was trying to score an invite into he ... [+]

I reached for the control strip and tapped the edit icon. Immediately, the scene changed to a woodland, dark fir trees casting long shadows beneath a heavy winter sky. For background effect, I added ... [+]

When I get home from Sunday Service, I strip my pressed white shirt in the living room. I step out of my slacks. Peel off the tight black socks. I fumble naked for my dive skin, the black and blue ... [+]

They stood at the end of the tobacco row, just beyond where the north end of the field met the woods. They stood in the shadows, perfectly still, watching only her. They reminded her of deer: thin ... [+]

Ain't no such word as "slomp" Jessey had scolded me just yesterday. But a crawdad pokin' outta the deep mud ditch alongside the river always made kind of a slomp sound to my ears. That's how you ... [+]

Elise finally succumbed to exhaustion just as the plane was circling Schiphol Airport. She was flying from New York to Amsterdam to visit an aging uncle. Elise had never left the U.S. before, had ... [+]