Carnie lives among piles of porcelain and Tupperware in a storage locker near Conneaut. She lost her job at the prison and then her house was foreclosed upon. Most of the practical things she owned

EVERY DAY IS SUNDAY

I go to call her for the ribs recipe but then I think how she doesn't respond to my jokes so I go to text her instead. And what I say goes like this: you used to make

Stanley K owns a small radio shop on Forest Avenue in Lakewood. 

I walk in, having not seen him in 30 years. 

“Stanley!” I exclaim, “how are you?!” 

“For virtue of your smile, here!” he

I don’t know why, but until I went to her door our neighbor Marie hadn’t spoken to me in more than a year.  I usually only see her in passing, but when I do she keeps her head low and doesn’t look

They must have been in Georgia already.  Mile-high pine trees loomed just above titanium light poles.  Rain was coming down at the car in a funny, sideways sheet.  Misting over the windshield.  

At the diner, when David has been allowed to order a cup of coffee and become a thinking person again, he will begin to attempt to isolate the exact point in time when he decided to leave his wife.

from Bombyonder

After the bird flu it wasn’t safe to eat the chicken or the stuffing. Gloves and knives couldn’t protect us. For the first time the chickens were calm as doves. For them, it was

Suppose the policeman does not come when you call him for help. So what good is the phone? What good is the policeman? Suppose the policeman is distantly related to a little Polish man who has

Curation

I told my first lie to a girl with a Hans Christian Andersen name, holding onto the metal bars in the playground while I spoke. The smell of pennies stayed on my hands until

The three of them were in the car headed eastbound I-90, on their way to Tiny’s Farm, when Millard thought of his first name of the day.

“Abraham,” he said. “That’s got to be the

He led her blindfolded through the kitchen, down the steps to the backyard. “Birthday girl,” he had whispered to her this morning, offering her coffee in bed. 

"Hills Like White Elephants" on a waffle.

One summer, under the streetlamps, the storm clouds, our friend on life support...

The new neighbors were moving vans and glimpses behind curtains. In time, they became an electronic fiction behind a white trellis fence. My dog could smell their vacancies.

My boyfriend cut off my arm while I slept. He had thought the whole thing through months in advance, he told me the next morning.

He slides an open palm up and down wallpaper that appears to depict horsemen and battalions in battle. He presses an ear to it. He tilts a framed print of Caravaggio’s Holofernes away from the wall.

Daniel heard it driving home...

Encore

He got a nice new haircut. His laryngitis was gone. His heart hurt less and the same with his head. His surgical scars had healed. He felt like food again. Strangely, the older and

You could still hear the sounds of their screams, over the water, as they tipped over the falls.

When Homer went blind, Langley’s remedy was one hundred oranges a week.

Four teenagers named “Phil” were tired of their dads not being rich.

“It is very frustrating to have a poor dad,” said Phil. His dad was so poor that their house had turned into a

Sterling-Silver Crook-Handle Bespoke Umbrella with Silk Canopy: $2,295

We hope that you never need use this umbrella.  Surely, a lifetime of sunshine and warmth is preferred to the

Note: Below is the style sheet for my novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, prepared by my fantastic copyeditor, Susan Bradanini Betz. While her marked pages were making

Pingo went first. He always did. The rest of us stood at the top of the slope over the place where the sewer pipes from town spilled into the narrow creek that  disappeared into a deep ravine west

On her bike in the rain, Sally could not shake the bus. The double-decker advanced no more confidently than Sally. She stopped to clear her bangs that conducted a stream down her open mouth.