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Diane Hoover Bechtler
We call them our Facebook sons. Facebook is the only place we see them. It is our entire contact with our sons. Belinda and I are bewildered, mystified, and deeply saddened by our sons' complete lack of communication with us. We signed up for Facebook accounts so we could once in a while see what our sons were doing.
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Randall Brown
When I walk into Hap’s office, he’s gone psychotic. No joke. He’s standing on his black swivel chair, screaming, “I exist. I exist.” His partner in the practice, the famous one, is yelling back, “Are you going? Are you? Just answer the fucking question.” Psychiatrists Gone Wild.
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Richard Burgin
“Do you want to go inside?”
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meeah cross-williams
It's those damn telemarketers again, her mother explains. That’s why she answered the phone sounding so irritated. "If it wasn't you on the other end, I was really going to go off. Last night they called at eight minutes after nine."
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Donald Dewey
We called him Johnny, but that isn’t what his mother and father called him. Back when they were drippin’ the holy water on his skull, he was known as Michel Grossard. Not a French name I’d run across before, but who knows with the French and the Germans and the way they’ve always been jumpin’ back and forth in Alsace? That’s where he told everybody he was from - Alsace. I couldn’t swear to it. When you don’t want people knowin’ where you’re from, you pick some place that’s got a new flag flyin’ over it every few years. Makes it harder to look up the birth records if that’s what you want to be doin’.
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George Dila
The sounds of Harry being murdered in the office at the end of the hall are the only sounds. The grunts, the thumps. The muffled expletives. No mercy. Harry being murdered, surrounded by a violent hush, breaths held, paper shuffling stopped, conversations ended in mid-word, typewriters stilled.
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Stephen Dixon
A woman calls to him from his bedroom. Hes reading in an armchair in the living room and drinking some wine. Come on, she says, what are you waiting for? Get your penis in here. The voice sounds like his wifes. It also sounds like the woman he met three months ago at a Christmas party and whom hes very attracted to and he would like to start a serious relationship with and even thinks hed eventually like to marry. His wife died a little more than a year ago.
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Josepha Gutelius
There is a sudden terror when we realize we are all the same, all forty-five of us, all forty-five names of divinity. We see a crow flying over and see what the crow sees: a row of identical navy-blue coats walking counter-clockwise around the Circle. We’re relishing our daily exercise after tea and the girl who stumbles out of line is screaming. Everyone knows why, suddenly everything connects, she is out of the Circle, we understand.
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Nick LaRocca
In the dark, Daniel pressed his flat palm upon the flat plane of Meredith’s breastbone, her double-mastectomy. A moan escaped her lips, puckered for a kiss, and he brought his lips to hers as she brushed her cheek, with sweet deference, against the sandpaper of his cheek.
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Nathan Alling Long
We were at a diner, sitting across from each other at a table by a window facing west. It was our third date, though she didn’t like to call them that. I’d first noticed her in a night class on American History, impressed by how she was always up on the read and amused by the way she provoked the teacher with her questions.
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Mike Milliner
It was the first time Reuben had ever been on the back of an ATV, jerking from side to side in the unpredictable wake of Downs’ navigation. Reuben sensed a gleeful bucking in Downs’ movements. The way the black and gray ponytail flicked into Reuben’s nose, some satisfaction in feeling Reuben flinch as they bounced in and out of creek beds. Downs leaned way over to spit his tobacco juice, but there were trailers that hung on and gathered across Reuben’s face like icy cobwebs in the wind.
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Ricardo Nirenberg
An image appears often in his mind, especially when he lies face up, looking at the ceiling. An old, rusty, useless ship come to anchor at this peaceful studio apartment at The Windsor Arms. Two active chimneys, one fore, another aft, a freighter of vague register and reluctant flag, she or he slowly heaves and sets on the slack water of a narrow, shallow harbor; yet, and this is something he has learned from recurrent dreams, Yankl is endowed, at bottom, with a capacious bilge. He doesn’t remember when that self-image as a scuttled ship with a huge, dark bottom, presented itself to his mind for the first time.
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Glen Pourciau
Surprised by the high price of replacement windows we began to discuss the sales rep who wrote up the proposal. She’d told us at our appointment that at one time she’d lived down the street from us, at the end of the cul-de-sac, the house with the fancy back gate. What’s her name lived there, I said to my wife, the one who used to be in the neighborhood Bunco group.
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Robert Radin
The young librarian’s first priority is to attend to the residents of the town. They often can’t remember the title of the thing they want, and sometimes they can’t remember the format—book, DVD, CD. Then he must engage in a kind of mind reading based on what he knows about the person. He must be a detective of the soul.
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John Ridland
During the War, Jim would go up from Flintridge to Spokane for summer vacation. Late in the afternoon, Aunt Daisy would drive him over the hills to the Southern Pacific station in Glendale, give him his ticket and final instructions, and make sure he boarded the right car, checking that the Pullman berth numbers matched his reservation. The train traveled over two nights north to Portland, where he would change for another overnight ride northeast to Spokane. The first time he made this trip, his father had arranged with the British Consulate in Portland for James to be met at the train and looked after until it was time to make the connection.
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