I hold the cloudy, dark plum, heavy in anticipation, weak from its own weight and firm skin. My lips surround it, privately tasting the sweet juice. I pull back dripping, wiping my chin, and watch the orange, soft golden, brown flesh expose. The skin now …
I had been seeing Megan for approximately five months, but I had known her my entire life. I never enjoyed our meetings. They certainly could not be categorized as something as romantic as a rendezvous or as mercantile as a transaction. Although, I was attempting …
The man entered the small, brightly lit café and quietly sat down in a high-backed vinyl-upholstered booth. The wire caged clock over the door drew the man’s attention. Why such an institutionalesque clock in a diner? It was 3:12 a.m. The café’s latest and only …
James Hall reviews Mark Doty's Sweet Machine, the author's latest collection of poetry, and is filled with an overwhelming urge to shop.
Aimee Bender is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, a collection of short stories published last summer. She is currently at work on a novel. Her stories are dream-like, wickedly funny, inventive and weird in the best of ways. The following interview …
We made bets. Innocent ones at first, silly things a man and woman in the early throes of dating try on each other. The wagers were fought in riddles. The befuddled one had to cook the befuddler dinner. The confounded ironed the confounder’s weekend wash. …
When my mother died, I inherited fifty wild birds, and an over sexed parakeet named Tony. When I stayed in her apartment the night after the funeral, I wondered if my mother’s ghost was still in that kitchen that smelled of dead chickens. Was she …
