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 ... [+]
Short Fiction
After I left Tom, I rented a house next to a cemetery. My mother offered to help me move. Standing in the gravel lot where I parked my car, she regarded the one-story clapboard partially hidden in ... [+]
The cool breeze drifts in from the Pacific Ocean through the banana plant leaves. Shadows dance across the pastel pallet of the bedspread; the charcoal nude woman looks over her shoulder. Jesus ... [+]
My friend Matty believed he could fly. "I have the cape and everything," he told me one afternoon. We were playing knights and dragons in his backyard when he pointed to the roof.
"You want to
... [+]
There was no sunlight that day, and flowers with banners naming the giver had no aroma. The Godfather theme music played in Maria's head while a cast of characters, like sepia photos in her mother's ... [+]
She danced naked in the rain, her palms upward to accept the droplets of moisture. Captivated by her own imagination, lost in a world of her own creation, a world where outsiders weren't welcome ... [+]
Near midnight she pedals her rented bike past Checkpoint Charlie. Vacant, but suitably restored, the off-white, utilitarian guard box occupies the middle of the street, protected from a barrage of ... [+]
Harold Gates slowed the snow-topped yellow taxi and edged it along the slushy curb to a stop where she stood, shivering in a tattered wool coat in a January blizzard on the steps of her unlit ... [+]
This job is a grand. We're supposed to deliver the piano from a suburban chateau into a self-storage facility. Why doesn't matter. Pick-up address, how many floors down; delivery address, how many ... [+]
"She's a difficult pleasure," I said of my ex-wife. I was standing at the front door of her house, talking to her new partner, Sammy, a woman. My ex-wife, Lily, was not there.
We both took in
... [+]
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 ... [+]
Straight out of high school Mick's uncle landed Mick and me second-shift jobs at a textile factory. I asked Mick what the company manufactured. Gigantic rolls of something, he said. From three until ... [+]
In front of him, for nearly every minute he was awake, there was a screen.
He tried to recall a time when it wasn't this way. He couldn't, so he watched old movies to try to remember.
"Yeah
... [+]
She sleeps like a dead weight now beside me, lowered into the night, the ropes of the day swaying around her. We know nothing about each other really. She does not know how often my ex-lover visits me ... [+]
Henry Miller is waiting for his cue to go on stage. He is about to become Aiden Bennington, a condescending trust-fund brat. But before that, there is a moment in which he is neither himself, nor an ... [+]