A New Kind of Literary Pulse

Once you become visible, it's hard to disappear into the shadows again, but Hank White was doing his level best. His life depended on it. People looked right through you when you were flipping ... [+]

"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 did she mean ... [+]

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 ... [+]

When did my heart harden? How did empathy slip away? Dr. Lindelson pondered these questions in the spacious office where she had practiced psychotherapy for forty years, since she completed he ... [+]

My father was a somniloquist; he only talked to me in his sleep. Lured at night by his one-sided conversation one room over, I would escape the cot I'd grown out of, gaze at my sleeping mother, and ... [+]

For all his life, Frank had been at war with the willows. They sprouted in and around the stream, clogged the irrigation ditches, and choked off the water flow. 
His land, a narrow plain between ... [+]

When they first moved in, the forest was big and lush behind the apartment building. It was the entire view through the kitchen window, standing at the sink washing dishes. Birds were often in the ... [+]

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 ... [+]

The moments of lucidity were rarer and rarer, but when they came, he regaled me with tales of swallowed teeth, basement brawls, and AIDS tests administered at midnight in ramshackle midtown health ... [+]

The liftoff is like an elevator.
You know that feeling you get when you're going up? Like your stomach is getting left behind? It feels like that. Remember when we were kids and we were staying ... [+]

There is no cheerful clatter of pans, or old Beatles records spinning in the living room. No warm cinnamon smell fills the air – only burnt coffee. For a moment, I'm half expecting Papa to swoop ... [+]

The garbage can is full again. I drag it inside and empty it over the floor, adding to the foot of water already standing in the house. The bathtub and the sinks have been running nonstop fo ... [+]

The doctors, explaining the consent form, referred to him as an allergen. That's the only reason he could figure they prescribed Claritin. Well, technically they didn't prescribe Claritin, being ... [+]

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 ... [+]

It was dangling there, hanging from a nail in the wall on a little copper-plated hemp string. It shone softly with a crystalline silver reflection, almost translucent. Sometimes, when through the ... [+]

For a long time, I went to bed early, always reluctantly, grumbling, cursing, and dragging my feet. The time to go to bed was suffering, a break from life, a phase that nothing or no one would eve ... [+]

The intense yellow sun was high in the sky. The fields were hot and the earth burned the feet of the men running in front of him – they wore no shoes and no one knew why.
There were fifteen of ... [+]

All adults have, in their memory, the places which defined their childhood. They just have to shut their eyes to visualize them and the feelings associated with these places come flooding back. When ... [+]

I am a doll.
I was born sixty years ago at Görlitz in Germany, in a hut in Stalag VIII-A.
I am the one for whom a Belgian prisoner of war, number 15825, opened his clenched fists and to ... [+]

I am waiting… I am waiting.
I have always been waiting.
My eyes are closed, as they have always been.
My hands float in front of my face, and even if I can't see them, I know exactly what ... [+]