Stories

You smell the scent.

It’s happened before. The first time, when you and your wife Claire cut through the cosmetics department at the mall, your heartbeat soared with such trepidation that you clutched at your chest, startling her

When your sister calls from Johannesburg and says, “I’m in the hospital,” say, “Hold on a sec,” then point to your phone and mouth important to the hostess, whose jeans are too tight and lipstick too bright for a five-year-old’s birthday.

Nature trumps nurture. Ellen believed it even before science arrived at the same conclusion, believed it even after science changed its mind again. Believes it now.

Arrive to the morning team meeting twenty-three minutes late, balancing multiple aspects of your life – papers, raincoat, laptop, handbag, umbrella, breakfast, gym clothes, lunch – so that you look like a circus performer.

Ackerman traced the fiber optic cable leading from the control unit under the customized sofa-lounger to the I/O port in the side of Mrs. Frimmel's skull.

I was the new girl at Coltrane’s. I’d come down from Jersey for my grandfather’s stupid-ass wedding and couldn’t figure a reason to go back—Mom gone, my brothers all married and cheating, just like every guy I’d been involved with.

For days afterward Leo’s life was like a dream. He thought about Julie and Mario driving across the country. In his head they were always whooping it up. He wished them dead in the desert, their bodies black and bloated. The image so disturbed him he wished them back to life.

Bridget is in the giftware section of the department store, running her fingers over the deeply discounted snow globes, when she feels

He returns to his favorite table and trusts zoom of pen over page without stopping or reading what he writes or sweating punctuation grammar syntax or pedantic rules like when to use lie and when to use lay and boy, would he love to get laid, it’s been a long time, this dry spell he equates with the African Sahel drought from over-cropping, to ironically imply man’s rape of Big Mama Gaia!

In the next house he could see that the good professor's wife had gone up to bed. The professor himself seemed to be stalling in the kitchen, weakly filling ice trays. He kept meaning to climb over and see what happens behind the upstairs curtains, but he resisted, not wanting to risk trouble with the human police before he had a chance to complete his plans.