You are driving home from a place that makes its own beer, where it seemed wrong to order just a few because this is a small business and small businesses, you know, are failing all over the

It was a difficult job for the man who painted night.  First off, he always stained his clothes.  An occupational hazard, and Frank supposed he could wear an apron, but when he arched his back,

Leo and I are dicking around in his room after school when I pull this big cardboard box out of the closet.

—What is this? I ask.

—That’s my card catalogue, Leo says.

—Is this every

Mom. Dad. Where have you been? Everyone else is already here. You missed the first prelim bout. I'll catch you up: Siyar Bahadurzada won by tap out in the second due to rear-naked choke. What? No,

In December 2013, Brooklyn Nets Assistant Coach Lawrence Frank was "reassigned" by first year Head Coach Jason Kidd, demoted from coaching on the bench to filing daily "team evaluation" reports

Sometime during the last two hours, Clark Griswold has stopped feeling cold.

He claws at the frozen ground, vaguely aware of the intensifying blizzard. Snow replaces the dirt he shovels between

Across the street, I see a large, jolly-looking man with a white beard and white hair leaving the house of our friends, David and Shelby. The man is wearing camouflage – the jacket, hat and hip waders of a duck hunter.

At nearly two in the morning, in the room across the hall from where his wife slept, Geoff Devine was awake, gazing down at the above ground pool in the backyard. Though he couldn’t see it, he knew that within the giant wooden drum, the murky water reflected the light of the moon. 

When I was fourteen my mother moved into an apartment across town with my principal, Mr. Lorenzo, who was rumored to keep a pistol strapped beneath his dress slacks. My younger sister, Caroline,

In jest you call for your horse, but there is no horse. It’s a bright lettuce-green morning, birds piping overhead. You are on foot, and follow the derelict tracks out of town past the Shell Station.  You step off the road and onto a furry plain of high golden weeds and yellow dross. This is strange. 

It only glows if I believe in God. Of course, the Fat Man doesn’t know that. Once an hour he comes into the barn waving his short black club, threatening to cut off my carrot supply. I sulk into

Lyle worked the night shift in a millwork factory, manning a machine nicknamed the Pincher.  Everyone hated the Pincher.  On the day shift they kept going through operators.  Before Lyle, the longest anyone else had lasted on the Pincher was two years.  At least that was how the story went.  Lyle hated the Pincher too, but he’d learned to live with it.  He’d been there nine years and would be there another nine if they let him.  By then he’d have enough saved up for a nice house, one with stairs and a workbench and actual carpeting. 

100k

He said that he got a letter from a used car dealership that said that he either won 100k or a grill. He said he knew it was bullshit and he would come over, but he had to leave in the

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.

The tornado craved fame. 

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.