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Category: Stories

  • Over Easy

    Mary pokes a hole in her yolk and watches the thick yellow ooze across the white membrane towards her glistening butter toast. She always cooks her eggs over-easy because, despite the name, those are the most difficult to make. Light taps to crack the shell. A slick slide into the skillet. And then the tricky…

  • the wolves, the zebras, the ostrich, the water buffalo

    the wolves The grey goes white sometimes or it is white going grey. I don’t know, I can’t tell. But their paws are what I like to watch, pawing in the ground. I wish I could stop one and lift its foot, these wolves. I wish I could squeeze, feel those big pads they have…

  • Things I Know About Fairy Tales

    When I was very young, my mother told me that she didn’t believe in fairy tales. They were, she liked to say, lessons dressed in fancy clothes. She preferred to excise the princesses and villains and instead concerned herself with the moral of the story. Once upon a time, not long ago, I was kidnapped…

  • The Moon Is A Star

    When the river dried to mud, us brothers, we walked down to the muddy banks of where the river used to be, and with our boy hands, digging down into this mud, us brothers, we dug down to where, we believed it, there was another river there, there was another river down beneath where our…

  • The Bay

    There was something in the Bay. Or perhaps it was just the suggestion of something in the Bay like the idea of a serpent in Loch Ness. The Bay was older than the Loch, and the rumor of something in the Bay was even older. The Squaxin fished the Bay long before the first Americans…

  • Cure

    The girl pretends she’s already in New York. The thought gives her a shimmery, golden feeling behind her collarbone. Lately, everything and everyone injures her. She’s become lugubrious and she’s only twenty-two. She has gained the approval of the landlady who takes note of her freshly pressed uniform. It is the way I am, too,…

  • Marionettes

    You never could get used to waking up early, flipping to HBO, and grinding out a few miles on the treadmill. You enjoyed your shoes pounding gravel, liked seeing trees and faces. You needed your mornings peaceful. “Use your head,” I said more than once about you running at night. You wouldn’t work out during…

  • Arizona’s Lonely

    1. Loosely Based On Us When we were in writing school, Violet and I decided one of the fiction writers had the biggest dick, and the poets who wrote about love would be best at going down. I said the ones who wrote about soup rain and mouths that looked like blackboards would be best…

  • Baby Love

    I had a baby. “Why’d you have to have a baby?” Denny wanted to know. “There are so many babies on this block already. You know this neighborhood’s really changing. First the Starbucks and then we got a Gap.” + I had a baby. “I heard you had a baby,” Ellen said. “Mina Denelsky also…

  • American Soma

    We noticed it first — we, who I like to think of as the extremely sensitive people, the ones endowed with an unpleasant aptitude for sinking to the very floorboards of despair and feeling the pulses of ugly truth that surge underneath them. I carry splinters in both my palms, and I’ve sniffed the traces…

  • Life Would Be This Way

    To Courtney, being even remotely cognizant of the possibility of one’s obsessive compulsive disorder seemed an indicator of obsessive compulsive disorder. She thinks she has obsessive compulsive disorder but doesn’t. Or at least she thinks she doesn’t. It was probably just loneliness, a way to count away the time. Matt has hair all over his…

  • Beauty

    Eddie and Kate climb over a guardrail. A narrow trail descends through huge dripping ferns. Strange smells – smoke, sewage, steak sauce – float between the trees. The trail opens onto a stony cove. Beyond it there’s a green glacial lake, then luminous blue slopes, distant, cut by trenches of snow. The far shoreline is…