Lily Stark’s mother had just said the facts of the murder were too horrible to repeat. But Lily’s father insisted a story as awful as how Mr. Sam was slaughtered would teach Lily something about this world. “I don’t care about the world you even mean,” Lily said. For a long time Lily had been…
On the evening of D-day, the pub is packed. It’s a close June night in the Welsh hills, with the threat of thunder. The radios of the village cough with static. The Quarryman’s Arms, with the tallest aerial for miles around, is a scrum of bodies, all waiting to hear the Prime Minister’s broadcast. There’s…
Jane and Evan moved to a small city in eastern Ohio and rented an old house on half an acre surrounded by a stone wall. Jobs came easily to them. People could see by their open and unlined faces that something good was happening in their lives. Evan went to work for an insurance agency,…
Nicky licks my eyelids. He pins me down and licks my eyelids. You should hear what boys call me always looking for the tongue in my mouth because my lips are the only place on me with any fat like maybe once they got bit. I’m a small town so up go my fists and…
The first thing she finds is a hand. In the beginning, she thinks it’s a tangle of sheet or a wadded sock caught between the mattress cover and the mattress, a bump the size of a walnut but softer, more yielding. She feels it as she’s lying, lazing, in bed. Often, lately, her body keeps…
Thank you, beautiful,” I said as my six-year-old daughter, Maude, came skipping over from the swings to hand me a warm, wilted bouquet of dandelions. Dandelions, the only flowers no one cares if you pick. Maude smiled at me, then turned and ran screaming back to the playground. “Stop,” she called as she ran, her…
You know, there is this amazing thing that happens when you begin to create a common history with someone. Each detail is fascinating. You could just go to a mall and hang near the fountain in the atrium, and you’ll find yourself going over that time as if it were the Zapruder film. -Mark Leyner…
You say there’s no time like the present. But what is the present here? I’ve watched TV for ages and seen movies since I was three. TV’s daily life and movies are a communal fantasy. Today is in color, yesterday’s in black and white, and there’s no agreement about tomorrow. I hear music everywhere, and…
The room was alive. I knew it better than my body. The whole house sighed and shuddered, breathing inaudibly through its doors and windows. In and out, in and out I went, and one existence melted like snow into another. The sun was fierce and crazy. I cooled in green pools or under the shade…
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