A New Kind of Literary Pulse

"Do you know what an idiom is?"
"It's like a phrase that has a double meaning, like when you say 'break a leg' to someone in the theater."
"Oh, that's horrible."
"No, it means 'good luck.'" ... [+]

During his journey back home in the slowly slumbering sunlight, he thinks to himself about what he would change. Him standing over her, six feet and one desperate inch compared to her five feet and ... [+]

"Dare," I chose. Kira's eyes gleamed, "Knock on Crazy's door." "What?! No one has ever gotten that close to his house," I exclaimed, looking around at my other friends for support. All four of ou ... [+]

It was counter-intuitive for Rita to fall in love with the dark, but it was also perfectly natural. Most kids do it at that age.
She had found a shadow, lurking under the large tires in the ... [+]

She'll wake up tomorrow.
She'll open her eyes to a cold day fractured by a beam of light dashed across her face. She'll wait there for a minute, grasping onto the last bit of a fading dream. He ... [+]

The hall closet was tall enough to stand in at the very front, but farther in it sloped smaller and smaller as the stairs above it descended. At about the point where an adult would be on all fours ... [+]

Ten years from now, I will be thirty-one. I picture this future person as someone who clambers out of bed every morning, wearing only boxers. His joints are stiff, and his newly-wedded wife will hea ... [+]

When Gary asked politely if she wanted him to tie her to the bedposts that night, Sybil politely declined. Polite, polite, polite - she was sick of it, the way he always asked when it was a nightly ... [+]

‘Getting old', Vyncor thought, ‘has been my worst decision yet'. He stretched and felt each of the gnarled knots of pain that ran through his back and neck, twisted up like tangled fishing lines ... [+]

"The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you."
― Rainer Maria Rilke
I sit in front of him watching him like the painting that hangs in a ... [+]

Close your eyes...
Be in the moment...
Breathe in and out...
Feel the air against your body...
Just take it all in...
Keep breathing...
Stay calm... ... [+]

The boy is obsessed with origami, his mother tells her friends. He sits at the kitchen table for hours at a time, folding and pressing and creasing and fitting. Microscopic tucks and pleats – tiny ... [+]

"Where the hell are we going anyway?" Cynthia asks Jess in a stern tone.
We've been on the road for several hours, stuck in Jess's mini cooper listening to nothing but Harry Styles and Miley ... [+]

My bloodless white fingers grasped my thighs, squeezing away like Sunday lemonade. I gasped, letting my head fall back. I thumbed the lining of my shorts, finding a loose thread and pulling hard. No ... [+]

Mallory Johnson lived in the suburbs behind a white picket fence and a dark pine door. Her husband called her "Mal" when he trudged in late on the weekends, drunk and tired. David Smith was a working ... [+]

A long time ago, in a lonely forest, lived three unlucky friends.
Vanished into the land of the lost souls, they were outcasts left to perish—left with nothing but regret and anguish.
It ... [+]

Springtime arrives with cherry blossoms falling over the streets of Florence. The shower of rosy petals are tangled in the ruby dawn. A young girl approaches those new hours of daylight in a different ... [+]

Anya sat slumped on the couch with her hands on her stomach, anxiously anticipating her husband's return from work. She watched emptily as her breathing raised her hands slowly up and down. Her navel ... [+]