“I love you, Frankie,” Jade says. I tell her I love her back. Neither of us believes it but it sure feels good to pretend we do. more »

There wasn’t much in the hut besides themselves and Amelia Earhart, and they couldn’t bear to look at one another in the eye. more »

She said, “A tall skinny man drove a knife into his body more than once.” She looked up at bright lights. They were not stars. They were not watching over. more »

When the man discovered that Lupe was staring, he grabbed the arrow shaft and walked to where Lupe was lying on his stomach. The man got on his hands and knees. more »

Lara is the fattest woman in the world, the signs say, though they have no way of proving that. Otto puts her on a big scale, the kind that’s used to weigh cows, and he has people guess her weight. more »

i ask my mother how you accumulate losses with aging and don't fail of heart. how do you just keep losing life and yet remain engaged with living? she says the problem is with america. more »

They sat, waiting, wondering what Julie looked like and what they were doing sitting in a car in cheap disguises, waiting to steal a little girl they’d never seen and sell her back to her parents, most likely for much more than she was worth. more »

He wishes, as bad as he’d wished earlier to be in that room with the dancing girl, that he could join them. But he’s looked through the wall already. Now, he knows, he can never use the door. more »

My friend was swallowed up by the Atlantic on the day I was to be married. She disappeared beneath the brown-blue waters, and I watched the stormy surface for her to head to come up. It never did. more »

My ardent fingers penetrate her vacant eye orbits, then withdraw. Penetrate, withdraw. Penetrate, withdraw. The sight that feels, the touch that sees. more »

Winning the Nobel Prize in Literature has done something to Steinbeck. He has become bored with writing, as if there are no new heights he can reach. In the world of hypnotism, he is considered a hack. more »

Sooner or later – one way or another – gravity is going to grab you, too. In this age of economic uncertainty, gravity is one thing you can count on. more »

I wonder how I’m supposed to tell Miriam I know quite well where she can find Tony, how we married after he got me pregnant on prom night, because condoms were a sin that didn’t even feel good. more »

She likes to name the leeches and recite eulogies before the nurses deposit them into a coffin of rubbing alcohol on their way toward the hazardous waste. more »

A Maine Guide called tonight, asking about the lake house. He lives ten miles away, in a town even smaller than this one, and he likes his hunters to be close to him. The place he had been putting them up at didn’t have electricity or a water pump. The wives didn’t like the outhouse. more »

She had become quite skilled at replication, to the extent that she could no longer tell what she had lifted from other people and what was genuinely her own. more »

The name Hirsute had started as a joke. This was back when he used to sleep in her bed, before they split the apartment. This was before he lost his job, before he brought home cardboard boxes. more »

He looks as though he wants to tell of everything good that ever happened to him. The time when he was sixteen and kissed his best friend’s girlfriend behind the dumpsters outside the Shezan Tandoori. The way her tongue tasted of sea salt and lemon. more »

Mr. Hansom called the principal, who called a wildlife expert named Jim James. Jim James arrived dressed in camel-colored khaki, in a truck like a cartoon of an African safari. more »

Hello. If you are reading this, please come help me. I am stuck inside of a giant bottle in the middle of a grassy field. more »