Bump Your Ass Off
Anna Mockler
We was going to be late if he didn’t hurry up, he was cutting it really close, and I was almost mad with Rudy if he was going to make us late for the end of the world at Coney. I looked at my Roylex and I said patient, it ...
New Bedford Real Estate
Amman Sabet
Usually, i tell people i’m from around Boston, but I’m not even from there. I grew up just outside New Bedford. It’s a port city on the South Shore that used to be big on whaling. You got lots of ugly Portuguese the...
Sodomy Is a Threat to National Security
Jesus Angel Garcia
COSTUMES
On Saturday morning at the KKK meetup, the hooded outfits came in a variety of flavors, from milky white to tea green. One guy wore a Confederate flag that made him look like a Southern-fried Statue of Libe...
Killing Williamsburg
Bradley Spinelli
RUMORS
It started like a whisper, a fall breeze through the drying leaves of September’s trees. We overheard words dropped like cigarette butts and unwanted taxi receipts, snippets of clandestine conversation inte...
Russian Graves
Larissa Shmailo
One of my favorite places in the world is the Russian Orthodox Cemetery in Spring Valley, New York, which is known as Novo Diveyevo. An Anglo, used to containing his dead in unrelenting grids of slabs of stone atop preternat...
The Forgetting of Water
Doug Rice
Mai struggles to experience the place of words in her body. The slow patience of her tongue, of her lips. The care she gives to each letter, the way each letter shapes her mouth. Each word changes her. This foreign tongue...
Sucker
Susan Scutti
I was walking along the south side of Houston, heading home from a friend’s house. I’d stopped by to pick up my copy of The Big Sleep, one of many loaned-and-borrowed books between us. I was living on Prince Street then...
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see ...
The Veldt
Ray Bradbury
"George, I wish you'd look at the nursery.""What's wrong with it?""I don't know.""Well, then.""I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to
look at it.""What would a psychologist want with a nurser...
The Nose
Nikolai Gogol
Part I
On 25 March an unusually strange event occurred in St. Petersburg. For that morning Barber Ivan Yakovlevitch, a dweller on the Voznesensky Prospekt (his family name is lost now—it no longer figures on a signbo...
The Soul of the Doll
Robert C. Hardin
Being the Recollections of a Late Inmate (1931–1946) of the Dalmarnock Asylum for Children in Glasgow, Scotland
The eyes were what changed and flayed me above all else—the eyes or, rather, the doll’s eye...
Sick Lazy Fuck
Mark McCawley
“If you look a dog in the eye too intently, it may recite an astounding poem to you. You might have been mad for a long time and have realized it only at that moment.”
—Jean Genet, Funeral Rites
Si...
Guy Walks into a Bar circa 1997, Hollywood
Karen Lillis
So this guy walks into the bar last Thursday, and he sorta “lets it slip” that he’s Lawnchair Larry. This older guy, you know? He says it to me right before I’m gonna tell him what he owes me for a light draft. I...
The Battle of Skinner Butte
Ray Jicha
Moving north from San Francisco I slept on the beach near Arcata then made my way to Eugene where I got dropped off around 10:00 p.m. I found a little downtown bar, ordered a draft to pay for the stool and washed down t...
How to Stop Smoking in Nineteen-thousand-two-hundred-and-eighty-seven Seconds, Usama
Chavisa Woods
I asked no questions about anything. i just wanted to smoke cigarettes. Lots and lots of cigarettes.
I come back once a year to visit. I only stay a few days. I try not to ask too many questions. There’s noth...
