Mary Ruth had been alive for one hundred and two years, and she knew things she shouldn’t know. She knew where the fairy rings of mushrooms sprouted in the woods. She knew that twenty years ago, Mr. Wilkins the shopkeep had been operating a still on his land. She knew why Ms. Perry, the beautiful young war widow, had died at the bottom of a cliff, and why that handsome new Reverend Taylor had run off.

She also knew how to keep her mouth shut. She knew the value of silence, and the value of listening. And sometime in her...

Read more

There was a comma where a semicolon should have been. This drove her crazy. She thought of actually shooting herself in the head but that would have required a 3-day waiting period; besides, she hated guns. So she kept going through the papers, red slashes here, smiley faces there. But many more slashes than smileys. Soon she just started making slashing smiley faces. Her students wouldn't know the difference, she thought.

After all, they couldn't tell the difference between simple punctuation so how could they get her irony?

John, her favorite student and best writer in her Senior Classics class...

Read more

I stand on the fine sand, gazing out to sea. We stood here before, didn't we? You and I. Younger, then. Innocent perhaps. Lovers learning about each other in those early days.

The time we spent on this beach was perfect. Like an advert on TV for far flung luxurious holidays. Our own private paradise. We didn't want it to end, did we?

A man walks past. Dressed in green trunks, he glances at me. I signal to him and buy. He's feeling lucky now. Selling watermelon and coconut is not easy at this time of year. I feast on...

Read more

god finger-painted the sky in blue, and glued on layers of fluffed cotton for the feel of it. he carefully arranged macaroni noodles below it, forming the shapes of volcanoes, of funeral pyres. he was making a field. he imagined sun ripened workers tending his pasta land, sweating and itching, and he made it so. they did not have time to wonder who created them. god was thoughtful enough to give them mountains to look at. he was proud of that. he took his artwork home for his mother to see.

Read more

They were trapped for seven days, four storeys down, in a subway car.

Just the two of them.

Midfight, mid-breakup, mid-life-altering-altercation, the lights had flickered. Then gone out.

In the darkness Jake had offered a tentative "Hello?" and chuckled quietly.

Cooper had shouted back. At the moment they realized the darkness would not abate, that help would not come, that they were trapped, they'd retreated to opposite ends of the car.

Cooper flipped the emergency switch and forced open a door. A rotting stench flooded the car.

Doors shut again they studied the opposite end of the car.

On the...

Read more

One hundred and eighty thousand pounds. Sterling. Sitting on her dresser, in tight little wads of cash. One hundred and eighty thousand pounds is a lot of money. Hell, before today, one thousand was the absolute maximum I had seen in any one place at one time, and that was in the hands of Stu, the dealer, and he was just flashing it around to show off. One hundred eighty thousand? It damn near crowded everything else off the dresser. And she was just, what, going to leave it there?

"Where's this from?" I asked.

"You know where it's from."...

Read more

Hello city, hello Amy's boyfriend way down there. Hello penny. Let's see if it's so, what I remember from 4th grade about what happens when you drop a penny off the Empire State. On this street we walked and I wanted to yell at people who cat called her and to ask them if they had mother's and shame them. Down by the sudsy Hudson River we laid out and looked at the buildings and talked about Kenya, about the merits of going away and trying to talk ourselves into a compulsion to stay. On that bench she cried at...

Read more

It was the fall that surprised me most. Stumbling, suddenly in darkness, in a vile body that felt alien, so different, so limited, so odd - nothing to...before.

They never believed me, never believed what I said, when I tried to explain where I belonged (this tongue is clumsy and cannot say the words I need - I use words like "sky" and "stars" and "above" and "far" but none of them even begin to describe home - home is the closest approximation I have, but it is, I find, unhelpful)

They tell me that such things - I -...

Read more

“Over here! It’s over here! I’ve found it!” yelled James, pointing frantically at the area to his left. “Honestly, there’s gold over here!” The shout seemed to fall on deaf ears. After months of searching the island for the treasure, and getting nowhere except lost, no one got too excited about so-called finds anymore. They would wander over in their own time, and usually they would kick at the jewels lying on the ground, or in the hole, or under the tree roots and declare them to be fake.

James, as the youngest on the expedition, still held out hope,...

Read more

It never speaks,
it barely breathes,
it never fades away,
It sucks you up, then spits you out,
leaving you behind.
It tugs at your heart,
then casts it out like trash.
it walks and talks with others,
but ignores you completely.
It cast it's line,
and pulled you in,
then threw you to the sharks,
you spun in it's orbit,
only to fly out and land on your face.
it left you for things,
pieces of paper and plastic.
it orbited your world once,
the left to spin through another.
that is the behavior of the void.

Read more

Contact


We like you. Say "Hi."