A New Kind of Literary Pulse

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 ...  [+]

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 ...  [+]

On his way out the door to a meeting with a client, the husband said, "We should have a baby," and the wife, pointing to one of the windows that overlooked the driveway, said, "We already have an ...  [+]

There is a story and it goes like this. There is a tower of brick and stone, raised up like a mountain. Its peak puts holes in the bottoms of clouds. A princess sits by the window at the top, and ...  [+]

When there is no water left, we'll leave. Until then, we ration what we pull from the well. Three-quarters of a bucket for drinking (a full one when the day gets above 90 degrees, which is happening ...  [+]

When you are a competent old man who lives alone, you can eat what you want for breakfast. This morning I had noodles, or rather noodle soup, a favorite of mine for colder weather. Broth with ...  [+]

One March afternoon in 1969 I was on the deck of a Chinese junk listening to the water clop against the wooden hull and enjoying a breeze that blew toward the South China Sea. The junk bobbed ...  [+]

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 ...  [+]

It was the first time that I had ever hated the sound of my own name. "Tommy, you're up," the coach had yelled down from the entrance of the dugout. I was sitting on the end of the bench next to my ...  [+]

"Voicemail. Faaabulous. Anyway... Good morning. I've arrived. And let me tell you: There's nothing like heading to a job interview and praying to God that you don't get it. (Oh this is Amelia by the ...  [+]

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 ...  [+]

Melody jostled a dust-coated box into the backseat of her car. The box had remained untouched for the three years she'd been at Harvard. Why had she insisted on bringing it to law school? She'd just ...  [+]

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 ...  [+]

The moment he entered the bar, I knew that Mister J. wasn't your usual guest. Maybe it was the way his eyes darted around, taking the measure of everything he saw, or that half smile as he twirled ...  [+]

Bag over my shoulder, I turn around once more at the threshold of the crevice: this cave was my last abode. Giving it up is hard, but I don't have time to feel sad: the tide of mist crawls at my ...  [+]

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 ...  [+]

He had never seen such a thing.

Seated on the front steps of the little house with the blue shutters, Michael scratches his head, mechanically looking at the file that he already knows by ...  [+]

When Eliana returned to the Phoenix Hotel Yogyakarta that night, she imagined that her grandfather's footsteps on the same floors, in the same hotel, after climbing the same mountain, would have ...  [+]