You’re a Good Man

The next time Teej found himself on Lorraine’s deck, the deal had worked out with his bank and he couldn’t help feeling high from imagining himself a homeowner. She had invited him over for a champagne toast to their deal and was now lifting the layers of his college masterpiece—a vascular illustration of chest wound trauma from a .45-caliber shotgun shell, with five overlays depicting the phases of successful surgical intervention. Read Story

Sealed Air

As Eve got inside Lieutenant Meade’s Camry, she suddenly got in her head the image of Chip’s dead body wound up inside his bale of bubble wrap. There was a gaping emotional hole in her life that kept getting torn wider and wider. Read Story

The Week of Dark Mornings

I stared out the window and thought how, with our novel, I didn’t have to try to think like a bad person because the killer was a ghost. All I had to understand was revenge. But with Mrs. Scovill, I didn’t know. She was a nurse who took care of sick people. But now her own daughter was a sick person. Was she bad for being in Arizona with a new life? Read Story

One Thousand Miles

He indicated they should follow him down a hall. He led them to a soundproofed room filled with guitars sitting on bespoke stands floor to ceiling. “Geez, Marcus,” said Pearl, “every minute’s Christmas in here.” The women looked about in astonishment, wondering if he was at all embarrassed by the curatorial spectacle. Read Story

From the Window of My Studio

Though she stayed out from under it, the sun was an obsession. It poured into the windows in the late afternoon, smothering the room in gold. She sat under a black umbrella on the sofa and tried to meditate while watching the rays move across the wood floor. Sometimes when the sun struck directly on the pillar of the Sudek books, there was a special kind of pain, a Hugo kind of pain. Read Story

Jesús

Jesús appeared on the fire escape as Rosalba was closing the curtains. He gave her the Mal de Ojo that Rosalba interpreted as “Why you let me go?” Rosalba asked the bird, “Why you come back?” Read Story

Ms. Tisch

Shock engulfed me. I couldn’t help gaping at her face in the same way that Alma Church gaped at faces. Beneath her left eye, the skin that had been purple was now a yellowish green, and I stared at those colors like they were the northern lights. That distressed eye was a portal into something profound that I wasn’t ready for and unwilling to accept. I wanted to push it back with all my might. Read Story

Where Is Everybody?

Phlox held out her arms and put one foot directly in front of the other as if walking a tightrope. “I don’t get how I get scared around crowds but still there just seems not enough other people. I dream about this all the time. Like, I can’t see in the dark, but I know there’s other people there.” Read Story

The Gastronomical We

Two people in a shared apartment who both eat dinner on TV trays. Shouldn’t Patience Purcell and Stanley Livingston be romantically together despite her tyrant father and tyrant cooking empire boss and his aversion to alcohol and older women? Read Story

Life? or Theatre?

There was something glamorous about her movement under the enormous lights—not exposure but amplification. Even on so unforgiving a stage, she did not seem lost, but rather the impersonal expanse seemed relieved to have been colonized, tamed, at last. I was stupefied into not even feeling my overlapping agonies. Read Story

Cannonball

“Would you die for your art?” is a question we’ve heard before. But how far would you go to hold on to it? Would you die? Would you marry a big fat man? Read Story

Casa Solar

Bill was too disgusted to pull into his own driveway. Instead he parked on the street out front. Cut the ignition and sat there with both hands still on the wheel. “I managed a candy plant twenty years for this?” Read Story