A New Kind of Literary Pulse

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 me ...  [+]

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 ...  [+]

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 ...  [+]

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 ...  [+]

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 whom ...  [+]

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 shape ...  [+]