Mister Mei Locks The Cooler At Two You come, come in my store, never  look at me; red beady eye, lights up closed circuit  TV. Only condensation is real! Sweating feel of tripping  latch, reach for Keystone Light half rack like  lime boysenberry ice cream, in pie case. I give good  deal, good deal always…

At Sunday dinner, Duke announced he’d built a lake on their grandmother’s property. A man-made lake, he called it. Once it had been a spring-fed brook or a pond but Duke had dug it out to form this lake upon which the children were meant to boat and fish. In the summer they might even…

This happened in Saint Louis. I was a regular at a half dozen bars. I managed to fail my language examination in German, then French, a language I had studied since seventh grade. By this time I was meeting students after class for beers. The students were always female and underage. I made $450 a…

SL: Three Squares a Day with Occasional Torture, your remarkable debut collection, forthcoming this January from Foxhead Books, features a wild assortment of characters and animals: voles, a fly, a monkey, the Swiss Miss girl straight off the box, a serial killer, a metallurgic woman, conjoined twins, even the Devil himself. This is not the…

The woman was eating a salad of all things. I was watching one squirrel chase another and cursing the day I was born. She said after one particular bite, I don’t understand people like you. At the same time the squirrel doing the chasing got distracted and went home. I remained, unprotected. I started to…

Quinn Braverman had two secrets she kept from her husband. One was that the real reason she chose him over Eugene, her neurotic, self-loathing, semi-famous ex-boyfriend, was to prove her mother wrong. She could have a relationship with a normal, stable man. The other was that Quinn knew another life existed in which she had made the…

Author’s Preface This booklet was written after spending a week at an artist’s retreat on Ossabaw Island, a wild place of ocean, swamp, field, forest, alligators, armadillos, and hogs off the coast of Georgia. + Joseph lives in Baltimore, where he writes and makes text-based art. His book of microfiction, Easter Rabbit, was released by Publishing Genius…

Sometimes I imagine you return. You put your nose in my hair and you lie to me. “I love you,” you say. I knew something odd was going on. I noticed legs of men on both sides of my body, but I had no body. I was an invisible being, floating, with simply my capability…

Each winter, when Kansas City was cold, Twyla would forget what the city would become in the summer. By and by, July would come and, once again, she would be stunned. She would take to the couch in the lowermost room of the house and she would lie still and she would repeat to herself…

for Mary Ruefle Every time it starts to rain, I would like to have sex. I’ve felt this way since before I knew what sex was. When I was a child and it began to rain I removed myself quietly from the company of siblings and clawed off their hand-me-down hi-tops and out of their…

Don’t Look For Her Lost at a Renaissance Faire, surrounded by knights and maidens, for the very first time in my life I prayed. I was six years old, and I thought I’d seen my mother with the blacksmith. I prayed for my grandfather to find me. I prayed that no one would swoop down…

My niece was playing crazy eights with her friend from the other side of the cornfield. On her father’s—my brother’s—futon couch, I was trying to start reading a novel. This novel had my brother’s fervent approval. He’d taken it down from his shelves. He’d gripped its lower corners in both hands and straightened its edge…