A New Kind of Literary Pulse

‘Next up is a framed photograph of last year's company get together!'    The auctioneer kept his energy up, but we'd clearly hit the lower end items.    I sipped my wine. Speaking of lower end. They ...  [+]

Behind the Door was a casino out of time. It stood on pillars of brown marble in lines stretching far past the horizon. An infinite array of chandeliers spilled their warm, artificial light across the ...  [+]

"Master is coming," the guard announces, poking his head through the chain-clad iron door. The room on the other side is full, yet a token dropping can be heard from a mile away.     After flinching ...  [+]

The Sheets document glowed a glaring green. Bleary-eyed on a muggy March Monday, she continued to type, her legs folded under her. The tinted seminar room windows blunted the day; it was hard to tell ...  [+]

I heard Ari discussing if she'll get rid of me today. I always knew this would happen, but this is the first time it's felt real. The notion of a fleeting existence. Or, at least the crumbling of my ...  [+]

The walls were a blinding white - almost too pure. They felt less like paint and more like calcified bone, caging me inside. I felt the graze of torn leather against my back, as toothpaste forced its ...  [+]

"Toom... Toom... Toom!" The sound of the light switch echoed throughout the gym.   
The time now – 5 a.m. It is still dark out, the moon merely mirroring the cast of the distant sun. A light ...  [+]

In the vagueness of my dreams, a handless man sits opposite me at the poker table. "Your turn," he grins sharply as he pushes all his chips forward. The cards are bloodstained. What is it that we do ...  [+]

The sounds of papers flipping reverberated through the room. Pens and highlighters were scattered messily on the floor. Each flip of the script was filled with frenzied scribbling. Annotation afte ...  [+]

Isabelle  We burst into the museum, and the tour guide launched into his speech the second we crossed the threshold. He spotted me right away and rolled his eyes, like I'd already ruined his morning ...  [+]

Haddow's bar was nearly empty that night. What was once a bustling business had deteriorated over the past twelve years into a musty joint not even the most desperate alcoholic would step foot in ...  [+]

On the edge of the pine forest, I decided to settle down under a neon cactus. Its bioluminescent buds would give me more light than the crescent moon. These cacti have always been enough to see my ...  [+]

Programmed to work, not to feel. Yet somehow, along the process of that programming, made just capable enough to understand every extent of how much I wasn‘t.    Wasn't. It seems of all the ...  [+]

I meet him the day Iran bombs Israel. Thousands of miles away at our idyllic Southern California campus, our engineering professor rambles about fluid dynamics. A soft chuckle draws my attention, and ...  [+]

"What's your backup plan?" That was the question everyone asked Arjun the day he announced that he was preparing for the UPSC Civil Services Examination. But Arjun had already made his choice. There ...  [+]

"I'm dying"  That's the first thing Helen said to me since I was here. She had been quiet for quite some time even after I ordered meals for both of us. Her Rolex glimmered under the light of ...  [+]

Red plagued the office corridors along with dissonant alarm bells. It was what jerked Violet out of her seat before she became part of the scramble towards the exit. Amidst the crowd, she chanced ...  [+]

   They called the city a furnace with streets. Kilns ringed the markets like open red mouths, and clay figures cooled on racks—lions with human eyes, queens with crescent crowns, gods whose smiles ...  [+]