A New Kind of Literary Pulse

Dear Editor,
Attached is my short story, "Lovestruck." Please publish it in your magazine as I see it becoming a runaway success.
Best,
Nancy
(P.S. It's allegorical.) ... [+]

Joe's knuckles bled, the result of inflation.
Tonya was some sort of greedy little Tinker Bell wannabe. She even had the wings to go along with it. She wore them every single day. The whole idiotic ... [+]

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who was stolen by a terrible necromancer. He and his rotting, clanking horde abducted her from the palace gardens and carried her away and away until ... [+]

They sat alone in the back of the sweltering Chevy, their plump pink thighs stuck to the seat. Suzie glared at her brother's hand crossing the sacred middle line, slithering forward like a snake ... [+]

"Mrs. Crump?"
The man frowning at Madge through the screen door had stolen a letter from the mailbox earlier in the week, so he knew the surname.
"Yes," Madge replied.
"I'm Harold Bates from the ... [+]

Working toward sainthood this summer solved some of my problems. For one, my daily-Mass-going mother got off my back about getting a job and moving out permanently. Plus, it gave her something to brag ... [+]

Jude always ordered hot coffee when he was falling apart. He leaned back in his booth and pressed his hands into the porcelain, trying to drink in the heat through cold fingertips. He couldn't taste ... [+]

Fred tiptoed into his room and slid into his desk chair, casting a worried glance over his shoulder as he opened his laptop. Typing as quietly as he could, he logged onto Artium Obscurorum and ... [+]

I arrive at the bus stop heading for work and see the moon has fallen from the sky and is resting in a crater where the Bell Tower used to be. I'm struck by how unimpressive it looks close up, beige ... [+]

They closed the last Blockbuster in Australia in March and a week later my husband died. The coroner said heart failure and I knew she was right – my husband loved that place. He went there every ... [+]

I heard it before I saw it, a jingling of bells like the soundtrack to a corny Christmas movie. Then out of the mist rolled a small carriage, round and bright as a converted pumpkin. Florescent ... [+]

Joan feels remorse for having hated her toes most of her life. She inherited them from her grandmother, who had hated them too. Her grandmother had cried at the swimming pool on Joan's 11th birthday ... [+]

The men who live in the woods behind my house had been getting out of hand for some time. They were all in their mid-fifties, golfers formerly, and meat eaters -- jolly men in general -- but since ... [+]

I was licking salt from the rim of my glass when Asli told me that elderly pelicans are often blind. She claimed that the force generated from smacking the water during a dive (and the fact that ... [+]

Probably I shouldn't have looked in that NO ADMITTANCE HIGH VOLTAGE DANGER OF DEATH door. I was loitering on the ramp to the #7 subway train at Grand Central Station. I didn't want to go home to ... [+]

We’re always asking for too much in this office. First it was raspberries. Now it is kiwis. The kiwis roll around on the table in our office kitchen then rot.
At work, I sit on the second floo ... [+]

It was a wonder the neighbors didn't complain. And I know it's irrational, maybe even paranoid, but I imagined the old guy upstairs must have heard me crying lately and was mocking my ... [+]

“Who are you?” her mother asked.
“I’m your daughter, Alice.”
“I know that. But I mean, who are you?” Her mother’s eyes locked onto hers; she was clutching Alice’s eyes. What ... [+]

Rule Number 1: When asked about your parentage, give suitably vague answers.
 
It was Jimmy Doogan, a boorish kid with freckles spread like flak across his face, who had been the first to ... [+]

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 ... [+]