A New Kind of Literary Pulse

There's a relief that comes with revealing things down to their minutiae; small gasps of relief make space in the bedroom for the proverbial elephant. I do have a good husband. He's the kind that does ... [+]

"Three of hearts," the demon says. He's lounging on Joseph's bed, deck of cards in his hands and shirt riding up over his stomach. He glances up, fangs flashing in a bright grin as if he can feel ... [+]

The brand-new baby is screaming. In French.
In German.
No, in French. It's definitely in French.
It isn't obvious, at first. It's not like she's screaming for a Weiner schnitzel or demanding a ... [+]

The sun struck my eyes as I rubbed the sleep off them. I stretched and yawned and felt the air. The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up straight. I couldn't help but smile because deep inside ... [+]

Tracy Jo Freely climbed a tree one day. A plum tree. The big plum tree at the end of Miro Street.
"When are you coming back down?" her parents asked her an hour later.
"Never," said Tracy Jo.
He ... [+]

He couldn't say exactly when it fell off, was sometime during the night when he was asleep. But when he woke up in the morning, the ring finger of his left hand was off, tucked underneath the pillow ... [+]

Every morning when I wake up, I lean out my window to say hello to Mom. She doesn't reply, but that's okay. She never was a good listener, even before she was buried in our backyard.
My brothe ... [+]

Some Bright Spark tells Crazy James the dog will make his fortune. Says the mutt can smell buried treasure like a pig snuffling out truffles. Of course, James doesn't know the first thing about ... [+]

In the office, she wrote everything on yellow paper: legals pads, while-you-were-outs, carbon copies, and sticky notes. Her eyes, so accustomed to the faded yellow of her workdays, had difficulty ... [+]

We spent hours at the store. Allison examined each animal one by one. She studied their movements, their noises and their smells. She looked at their feathers, spots, fur patterns, and colors. She ... [+]

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 ... [+]

I saw them once, when I was little. Maybe age four or five.
The tree on the other side of the fence had branches stretching over our garden. It was too tall for me to reach the succulent, juicy ... [+]

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 ... [+]

I heard it before I saw it, a jingling of bells like the soundtrack to a corny Christmas movie. Then out of the mist rolled a small carriage, round and bright as a converted pumpkin. Florescent ... [+]

Jess was only ten when the first pods washed up on the shore. She'd been standing with her toes dug into the sand, letting the cold Atlantic Ocean swirl around her ankles, daring herself to venture ... [+]

The dryad who lives inside the oak tree has been terrorizing the condo building dwellers for generations. She throws acorns and pours sap and drops pollen on their cars, and causes severe allergies ... [+]

Probably I shouldn't have looked in that NO ADMITTANCE HIGH VOLTAGE DANGER OF DEATH door. I was loitering on the ramp to the #7 subway train at Grand Central Station. I didn't want to go home to ... [+]

I never thought I would end up like this – like a tabloid horror story. Someday I bet I'll be discovered dead, here in my tiny, piss-scented apartment, being devoured by my seventy cats.
Thing ... [+]

Randall stood before his bathroom mirror – gazing at the enormous, glistening dome that was his head. Creams, lotions, infused oils, battery-powered skull caps; he had deployed them all in his ... [+]

A woman who claimed to be a chimera called the library most Tuesdays, on the old line they never got around to disconnecting after the renovations. The call went straight to a yellowed phone hung on ... [+]