Two queens walk out of a bar and light a cigarette, me and Lucy Littlefist. Lucy says this. She says, “In a relationship,” she traces quotation marks in the air around the word, “one of you always loves the other more.” And she’s right. She secures her wig with another bobby pin, pulls at her sequined dress. 

“Everything I touch,” he said, twirling his fork in a plate of linguini, “turns to mold.” 

There was once a time when my aunt and uncle had room enough to take us the odd weekends our parents were on vacation. Their house was smaller than ours and I felt haughty in it. The walls were dark and the air smelled musty. In the afternoons dust poured in the air like cigarette smoke in an old black and white movie. Going out into the sun was blinding. 

Hanging panties like cat skin, or Books of Dead and leaving in nighties. The jambs are so low. Lights on high are anything but warm. That pipe is what we think it might be: lost focus. He just

Cops come and take Hannah s Dad away this morning, throw him in the back of a car and yelling and screaming at him the whole time like he done left the ice cream out all day.

Win wasn't homeless, which set him apart from the others. But he'd hit rock-bottom, jobless and sharing enough to be one among them. In the fifty-station clinic, they were strapped to centrifuge

We’d been running longer than my memory. Our path was never obstructed, a well-worn corridor. Parallel walls of thorn-thick foliage kept us contained. 

I like to believe it started with her grandfather’s blessing and a bottle of spray paint—even though it might not have. 

And in the winter I traveled by ship to a land of copper domes and cobble roads, of shops glowing beyond frosted windows, of lampposts capped with mounds of snow, where I fell in love with a girl with an abnormal face. 

Because I can tell it's going to be a crappy day at work I dress up as Virgin Mary with my blue silk dress and white head scarf and lemon drop halo that got coffee spilled on it so it's a little warped, but it will do for one day of selling shoes.

When Ettore was a boy, he dreamed of puppets hovering over his bed. 

What came next was one long show: broken strings, smashed microphones, guitar solos without boundaries or purpose, house parties with bands in the kitchen and bands in the attic, missing kick drum pedals, stolen snares, songs we couldn’t figure out how to end and we drifted inside them, lost within our own imaginations.

Z’s phone rang. He picked it up and said hello. The person on the other end asked if he was Dr. Schlesinger. After a pause, Z said, “Yes, this is he.” 

That statement, of course, being a lie. 

“Hello ma’am. I presume you are the lady of the house. Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Mr. Basal and I believe that I have something you’ve lost – something you’d like to get back,” he

White light from the television brought me here.

Everything in this store is very far away from everything else in this store.

I pass razors and products containing ephedrine or

Day one, just a few hours in, and the first scratches from his insides, just a little suggestion: only a nibble.  He tries to kill the animal stuck there by gulping down water, by dousing it with

Many young novelists have been gravitating toward a movement known as the “Real Newism.” Adherents of the Real Newism assert that effective fiction requires “experiencing events.” And today, you

Buckhorn Golf Course

36 FM 473, Comfort, TX 78013

4 out of 5 stars

This place is a real gem. Just imagine the scene: The Buckhorn Golf Course opens up before you, revealing layer

When Rob sent out pictures of Sophia, innocuous prints of her at a bar or a party, he found himself getting pictures in return. These pictures he got were never family portraits or pictures with

I drove to the STD Clinic. I walked in and told a woman in an office through a window slightly larger than a fast food drive-thru window my name and appointment time. She handed me a clipboard with

You will forget by your fourth birthday these your shifting first memories—your father’s goats at their graze, their black tongues slathered across your face, the chickens prancing and clucking upon the dirt of the yard, the spare trembling grasses and the crazed droning song of the grasshoppers, their brown juices streaking the lines of your palm.

Don’t believe me if you want, but the hole just appeared one night.

In sandtiger bellies, the young eat the young. You could fit a new-hatched sandtiger pup in your hand, but you shouldn't; they are pink, squishy cartilage, knife-tip teeth, and only the first one survives, chasing siblings down uterine hallways: hide and seek to death. After eating all his brothers, the last one standing sucks yolk like CapriSun from his sharkmom's eggs. By the time the sharkmom gives birth, the pup is the size of a six year old child. 

It’s pity sex for both of us, me and Karen and her glass eye, in a motel room off the interstate.  

It is not easy to remove a heart with a spoon from the chest of a man, nor is it clean. The spoon was purchased 48 hours earlier from the Bed, Bath & Beyond on 9th Street. The Nicole Miller Moments 5 pc Flatware Set was $24.99. The salad fork, dinner knife, dinner fork, and soup spoon were disposed of. Only the teaspoon remained.