Mom bought me Wilbur Mohammad’s Geo Metro for eight hundred dollars, an electric blue stick shift, a flea of a car. Wilbur’s down the road from us, and I’d been seeing that car in his front yard my…

"There is no such person over the long term." --Alain de Botton I. When I leave my college sweetheart, it’s with conviction in the sweetness of his heart. He’s good in a world where goodness is held a…

After my husband died I started drinking coffee. I drank it before but I never liked it, not that much, his death kicked something in me. It’s as if it turned on a secret gene, a gene for liking co…

My lover is a voyeur. He likes when I wear pale pink underwear, the ones cut like a bikini bottom. The underwear’s silky flesh emits a sheen under the bedroom lamp light, making me feel invincible.…

The fucking Doctor did it wrong. Ben Casey or Marcus Welby would have had him come into the office and sit down and break the news gently, even pat him on the shoulder, ask him if there was someone…

After she moves a load of warm laundry from the dryer to the folding basket for the fourth time that morning, she gathers the detritus of her family’s t-shirts and socks from the lint trap. She won…

Monye washed her hands with water, sighing heavily as she looked around at the lines and lines of the wounded, for whom she had been crushing herbs and administering hot bitter concoctions since th…

They say you can only see us from space. From there we are tiny flicker pinpricks, a join-the-dots circle of light, bobbing on a dark sea. You would need to go to space to know we exist. I wake up …

You must be desperate or something, because you haven’t looted in ages, and your fingers tremble when your eyes fall on the wall of spices, the second biggest you’ve seen (the first you witnessed w…

Mitch sees a man in the patch of yard between the apartment buildings banging his head against the wooden lamppost. He’s not leaning into it. It’s like he’s testing it, thinking about hitting his h…

On My Day Off I was getting my hair cut when my wife, a midwife, called. I let it go to voicemail. In the voicemail she said, “You have an envelope waiting for you at home.” She said she was afraid…

It is strange the way they encourage us to seek out and squirm into places which are usually forbidden to us, but we are having too much fun to waste time questioning. Miles has spent most of the m…

I dreamed there was a panther loose in our neighborhood. I tracked the panther until I found it crouching beneath a little girl’s bedroom window down the block. It did not attack me. Instead,…

We deserved new snow that morning, snow that had fallen all night, accumulating, blanketing, heavy and wet. We wanted it coated with ice, a slick shell perfect for sledding and canceling school. Ha…

Geoff says he’s sorry, but he’s not going to touch me tonight. My feet are on his lap and his arm weighs them down. He’s doing that thing he does when he sprints—curling his lower lip above his upp…

I was left under a rock in the woods when I was a baby. An older man, his wife, and his son were hiking when they heard me crying. My dad lifted the rock and there I was, cocooned in a cavity of ea…

I’m still trying to figure out if this toucan behind the bar is real, and I’m running out of time to ever know. When the alarm first went off, there was a pantomime of general panic. I went up to o…

The first time the county men knock we move east: away from the bedrooms, towards the shabby, sun-fronting den. The dogs follow. The men follow too, on the other side of the walls, their hands moving away the ivy and cupping against the foggy window…

Jane was the ugliest woman in the world. This was whispered into her ear the day she was born and never left her body. When she was barely a few months old, her mother entered her in an ugly baby contest and her picture was printed on the back page …

It happened between photographs sixteen and seventeen. Now, the number on the top of the disposable camera reads: twenty five. Michael holds it up to his face and looks through the eyepiece, framing Snowdonia. The camera is weightless in his hands, …

In the half bath Joni is watching Sofia applying lipstick, jam colored, butter smooth and brand new, applying with ginger fingers to not crush the fresh angled plane of the stick. Joni’s on the toilet, skirt hiked, back of crossed legs pressed into …

It’s that feeling of being bound up in scaly bandages. Some squirm against my body, others wrap around limbs— those are the constrictors, I suppose. Even my head is covered. It’s a helmet of cold meat. The smell of anxiety. The question is, why snak…

Moose Lodge #1384 by Lisa Ferranti – Lost Balloon via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2MtDoIz

We rode the bus all night long. Outside it was wet, the irritating summer drip. The bus felt safe and dry. Remy, my second cousin, drove it around the block and then went around the town in circles…