fiction: results 97–120 of 133

When I woke up without my little toe, I knew it was going to be the day.

Kaya is missing. She is nowhere on the beach and Steve is worried that she's gone swimming, and has slipped drunk into the ocean and drowned.

My boyfriend is a helium balloon, way above me, gently tugging at my hand. His head tosses in the breeze, craning whichever way the wind blows, his neck long and flimsy. I tell my friends how jealous this makes me—that he's looking at other girls—and they say I am being silly.

On 25 March an unusually strange event occurred in St. Petersburg.

Richard is an outcast. He has bony elbows and a face that's all nose.

You are minding your own business.

"Do you want to know what I think?" Eddie asks and you think, no dear god—not him again.

His cubicle wall shuddered for the third time in the last hour, and he automatically began fishing fallen thumbtacks and papers from the crevice where the wall met his desk. He'd tried talking to her. He'd tried making a joke of it. But no matter what he said, Patricia Trumble's enthusiasm, speed, and girth propelled her rolling desk chair into their shared wall space repeatedly each day.

Somewhere in New Mexico. The bar is almost empty and the sun cuts a pattern like a paw print across what was once a beautiful countertop, giving it length, making a confessional out of the tiny crevices of its beveled edges. The bartender is a man who used to be handsome—now he has to work for his living. He begins with a conversation.

In second grade I learned about abuse and the German language.

My wife's sister called a few days ago to set up a get-together for this weekend. They only live an hour away, so I don't mind.

Club meeting, convened. Fluorescent lights shine candescent where once our faces were lit dimly red and blue by beer-sign neon glow. Captain up front, popping his gavel made from the antique walnut stocks of a Colt Peacemaker.

The problems with the house project and a good stiff drink seem to go together.

"Pat, you should start doing the wangs now so that the sass is nice and tacky," Tom says to me as he pumps the keg. Tom is wiry and handsome. I'm neither of these things.

It's 6:30 Sunday morning, and I'm sitting on the couch Laura bought, listening to some televangelist while I look at a girlie magazine.

My friend says, "If you look for love you'll never find it." Then she tells me how she and her boyfriend take a shower together every morning.

"It's an Affirmative Action thing," said Jay Hamilton, Minoru Taniguchi's old friend and new colleague, who was African-American. "Not that any of the faculty will say it to our face."

This is an outsourced text. The authorial voice known (or, for the most part, unknown) as Ptim Callan has outsourced the creation of this short story to a multinational contracting agency whose name could not appropriately—tastefully—be given here.

I nod off? Listen. Call it a bell though it buzzes. More crackle than buzz. All my life, houses. Houses have bells. Apartments buzzers. Townhouse Georgia calls it. Shithouse. Listen.

A crucifix hangs beside the travel poster, which shows snow-capped Alps in Switzerland. Both are artifacts left by the room's previous tenant. A third artifact is newer, the silver-framed photograph of Jules's mother. She smiles beside the dying Jesus. This wall is the first thing I see when I awake.

Near the old Jefferson Airplane mansion, in back of a cab on the right side, drunk on more than wine, I'm looking over at the sedan next to us. The passenger is the stellar blonde replica of a porn star/exotic dancer of some repute.

Still in the sunlight he had to squint. His eyes, never his most trustworthy apparatus, still hurt. Sunglasses were an option at first but they made him self-conscious, as baneful a death as blindness.

In her dreams of November Isabel was always free. Consider: November in the district of Novaliches is the perfect medias res.

"I would like to—I mean, I do write what I call closet fiction—"

Dr. Edwine was pontificating at his own reflection in a brandy Alexander puddle (a man his size had no fear of a ladies' beverage redounding poorly upon his masculinity).

Trains run late. They always run late. Do they even have a schedule?