The position was meant to be temporary, covering for the receptionist at a dental clinic while she visited family for four weeks.
It did not yet boggle their minds that the insides of those things that fly also look like the insides of those that swim. They had yet to question why the bones of a fish could look like the bones …
Their forever never lasts that long. Gone by Christmas.
A cupboard is just asking to be opened. A cupboard doesn’t ask a question, but is, by its very nature, an entreaty. A cupboard says it did not ask to be a cupboard, did not ask to be an entreaty, …
The chicken crows at midnight. Crows at four o’clock in the morning. Crows when it rains. Crows when the sun sets. Crows when sirens blare down our street. Only stops crowing to eat.
The man was his father. How could he be so disgusted by him? His mother, long dead, always told him: your father will outlive us all, but not before he makes us suffer as much as he wants to, and …
Six hours into drilling, rescue crews heard one-year-old Jessica McClure singing “Winnie the Pooh” from the bottom of the abandoned well she had fallen down seven hours earlier.
But a job was a job, I reminded myself. Fulfill your duty. Prove your utility.
It was one of those thunderstorms came on sudden-like. Before a body could cover its head it had passed on someplace else. Here, in our holler, we were used to such storms.
And maybe if you had tried to find your kindest self—the one deep within you that all our friends told us probably wouldn’t reemerge until you were twenty-four—and said, yeah, you’re right, …
Years later, Toya would remember the boy’s birth among the coca plants, how he’d arrived in silence, like some sort of harbinger announcing the end of the world.
Perhaps we three shall only ever have in common the murder of Adler. And white garments, shoes, stockings, sleeves—even the body of the Pemaquid Point Lighthouse is shell-colored, if you ignore her …
According to a 2013 census, Japan has a population of 127.3 million people. Approximately 1.9 million of those residents are foreigners. I, a white American, have been inconsistently part of …
I throw the keys at the mirror and they crash, a pitcher of water shattering during a high note. Applause-worthy. Mickey says I fight ghetto and I always say that’s right like I’m proud of who I …
Lie and say you have to pee. In his bathroom, check your purse for the condoms and then list, in alphabetical order, every kind of lie you can think of: barefaced lie, big lie, bullshit, fabrication, …
SAFE Employees make a SAFE railroad. With SAFE employees, a railroad devoid of any mechanical safety devices CAN and WILL be operated safely.
As they headed back into town in Smiley’s pickup, she could only feel like they had all done something wrong, something to be ashamed of. Something they could never talk about again.
As a witness should I run to her? Make sure she's not suffering a stroke or an aneurysm? I pictured a headline demanding the whereabouts of a witness who'd left the scene of a potential homicide.
Bars or no bars, if you did have something worth having, they’d take it, whether you were ridiculous about home security or not.
She understands the place she was born into is full of shadows. They slip into her open cracks, slide oozing into the gutters of her ribs, spill against the long, unbroken lines of her legs.