[Fiction] A home-schooled minotaur enters high school and learns to adjust: At the mall a lady offers me a free sample of zit cream and I’m about to be all sarcastic, like “Look, lady— I’ve got a giant bull’s head. No one’s going to notice a few zits.” But there’s something about the way she’s […]
Tag: fiction
[Fiction] When one person loves the other just a little more: William was tall and thin and shy and awkward in school. His best social tool was that he played the piano, and so was recruited for school musicals, which placed him at rehearsals and cast parties with kids he would otherwise scarcely have known. […]
[Fiction] A couple prepares for another predictable evening with old friends: Later, he came out of the bathroom just as the toilet was completing its roar. She was no longer in the kitchen. He took another cheese and cracker. He walked past the dressed table to the living room. She sat on the sofa reading […]
[Fiction] A sisters’ weekend and an unexpected encounter bring back memories: When Trisha comes to town we have to go out. She’s the bitterest soccer mom of all time and as part of her escape from home she wants to get drunk and complain about her workaholic husband and over-scheduled, ungrateful children. No one appreciates […]
[Fiction] An urban teen moves to Virginia and tries to stay out of trouble: When Marcus’s mother and her boyfriend and just about everybody they knew were put in jail for possession and conspiracy to distribute cocaine, Marcus went to live with his aunt for a while. Marcus was sixteen, a hurdler and sprinter on […]
[Fiction] A teenage boy falls into criminal life: It was the first summer Jack and Mom didn’t care when I came home. Finding things missing around the house, Jack had said something about his wallet springing a leak, and it better fix itself fast. I was a much better liar than Betsy, and had perfected […]
[Fiction] Excerpt from McEwan’s forthcoming novel Sweet Tooth. A young woman is introduced to the man who would recruit her to MI5: My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with ‘plume’), and forty years ago, in my final year at Cambridge, I was recruited by the British security service. In the early spring of 1972, when […]
[Fiction] A born-again adolescent takes a joyride with his wandering uncle: My parents and I had been waiting for Uncle Skillet to show up for five hours, wasting an entire Saturday as far as I was concerned, and not just any old Saturday but a glorious early summer one of God’s pure sunshine and chirping […]
[Fiction] A grandmother’s ruminations on a Southern road trip: The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge […]
[Fiction] A teenager’s grief and its aftermath: Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her. You’d fuck […]
[Fiction] The life of a supposed hedonist: Kromer knew it was also his job, what he was a clerk at. The shop was called Sex Machines. There Kromer retailed chunky purple phalluses, vials of space-age lubricant, silver balls and beads for insertion, latex dolphins with oscillating beaks. The shop’s owner was a maven of Second […]
[National Magazine Awards finalist] [Fiction] A honeymoon set in Eastern Europe in the 1970s: Since the beginning of their honeymoon, whenever something went wrong she had been eager to remind him. Is this enough of an adventure for you? Aren’t adventures fun? But here they were, in Bucharest, sitting on the edge of a fountain […]
[Fiction] An elderly woman encounters her past at her nursing home: A beautiful day—even though Elise can smell chickens from the poultry complex down the road and exhaust from the interstate, even though the pear trees in this so-called orchard bear no fruit. The mums are in bloom. Bees glitter above the beds. And a […]
[Fiction] Two couples, living in a “Yooper town,” dreaming of a better life: Craig is sweet and smarter than he or anyone else gives him credit for. After a long day of work, he smells like sweat and sap. He likes to read Decadent literature, especially Oscar Wilde. I’m the only one who knows that. […]
[Fiction, not single-page] A lawyer can’t stop walking: He worked past ten most nights, and most nights found him sufficiently absorbed in something that required only the turn of a page or the click of a mouse — too little activity for the sensors to register. The lights frequently switched off on him. He’d look […]
[Fiction] Taking a trip to Times Square: Ginny had promised to take the girls to M&M World, that ridiculous place in Times Square they had passed too often in a taxi, Maggie scooting to press her face to the glass to watch the giant smiling M&M scale the Empire State Building on the electronic billboard […]
[Fiction] A student juggles the present and the future: The future is messy. Scott’s senses feed him all possible futures at once. He’s learned to wander only a few seconds ahead. That’s close, but it’s still not normal. This man, though, is a relief to his senses. He makes everything clean. Scott wonders for how […]
[Fiction] A woman on an Arctic cruise encounters her past: At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of […]
[Fiction, not single-page] A father, his sons, and what he teaches them: When we got home from school Paps was in the kitchen, cooking and listening to music and feeling fine. He whiffed the steam coming off a pot, then clapped his hands together and rubbed them briskly. His eyes were wet and sparkled with […]
[Fiction] Life behind the cash register, and other possibilities: A proper mental Saturday it is, what with New Sue off with her hernia and the Lukes of Hazzard gone AWOL, so Muggins Here’ll have to cover for everyone else’s break. Not New Sue and Beverly are still giving me the silent treatment ‘cause I can’t […]
[Fiction] The story of a couple’s life, in 11 places: They stand on a rock ledge beside the shore, boy and girl, leaning together, their bare shoulders touching, as the adults unfold and arrange cots. Her father watches them as he sips from his bottle, though, and he knows what the night means. He calls […]
[Fiction] A marriage and its outside interferences: When she told her husband that David Cannon had arranged for her a series of recitals in South America, she looked to him for swift response. She was confident that anything touching on her professional life would kindle his eye and warm his voice. It was, in fact, […]
[Fiction] A family of children escape starvation in North Korea: The day the siblings left to find their mother, snow devoured the northern mining town. Houses loomed like ghosts. The government’s face was everywhere: on the sides of a beached cart, above the lintel of the post office, on placards scattered throughout the surrounding mountains […]
[Fiction] A young boy plays with the truth as he skips school one day: Your stepfather walks toward you. He takes your chin in his thumb and forefinger, and turns your face back and forth, as though it were a piece of merchandise he was thinking about buying. “You must have fallen pretty easy,” he […]
You must be logged in to post a comment.