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The guy was looking at me like he meant it, so I walked over to him. Will you vote for me, he asked. Why? I said. In the election, he asked. I’m running, he said. Will you vote for me? Why? I said. I believe in the things that you believe in, he said.
It was during my last year as a graduate student in San Diego that I experienced for the first time what it meant to be the object of someone else’s… how should I put it? “Romantic interest”? “Passion”? “Love”? Until then, love had been for me something I was in, and the object of my affection was either dead, or a literary character, or some other unattainable person.
"Such free places would never be created on earth, he had finally come to understand."
(An Excerpt from a Historical Fiction Novel About Poet Vachel Lindsay)
On Halloween, the neighborhood children dress up like neo-conservatives and go door to door spreading lies.
This unknown man can be seen in probably the most dramatic scenes of heroism ever captured on film.
Fat People Fat Camp convened in June with sixteen overweight campers, all in dire need of direction and rehabilitation. The camp was held on the campus of the Wuxi School for Exceptional Students.
The family liked so much to flush their trash down the toilet that they sold their TV and used the money to buy three chairs to arrange in their upstairs bathroom.
I have a need to be liked not just by strangers but by people who will never meet me, know me, or consider me as an individual.
Dad's presence had shed a sort of good light on everything, but with him gone we could all see each other better: My brother was good and deserved a lot, my mother was weak and needed care, and I was not a good person.
Without my heart the world seems very quiet, hushed, like when a storm knocks the electricity out. I hadn’t realized how loud it had been, the steady beating, the rush of blood in my ears, until it was gone.
"We both know how to manipulate the public. Let's play the game."
"His eyes, my Andere Vater's eyes, they would hurt so much, but he kept smiling, never frowning, never complaining.
"And you, I love you!" the prom queen said to Sylvia, who sat quietly, never looking up from the television. Sylvia was watching "The Price is Right" and she didn't like to be disturbed. Every now and again, she'd yell out, "Four hundred and fifty-one dollars, idiot number two! Goddamn you, you're losing, loser!"
I remember the day he was conceived. The day Lily said, "Today's the day." She actually said that, "Today's the day." We hadn't heard about your organization yet, what you do.
Days went by as I stood in the woods waiting for a tree to fall, and when none did, I determined the universe is cold and indifferent and that man’s only hope is to buy wood chippers.
Adam, the First Man, sat on Eve's floor in a pair of blue briefs. "Hold this for me."
It was sometime during the summer that Billy and Patty realized their father was finally going crazy, and that there was nothing they could do about it.
The last thing I remember from that night was dancing on a table with a pitcher in each hand, singing “Sonuva gun, gonna’ have some fun, in the bayou.” Inside, I could hear the bloodhounds coming.
The symmetrical rows of Nazi-planted pine forests click by like the tines of a giant hairbrush. The forest for the trees—a saying that means missing the big picture. Guilty, she thinks. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
Though I am definitely myopic, I’m not naïve. I’ve met Communists in America before today. But not the real ones.
After this, you will leave the chocolate factory for a job on the Kölner-Düsseldorfer Linie bringing American tourists to see castles along the banks of the Rhine.
Sanger's Grocery Store sold binoculars, bows and arrows, canoe paddles, and whittling knives. I pulled down one of each and shoved them at my mom. This was our new rule: she always had to check the price.
Ben Sobel tests cosmetic products on small, restrained mammals for a living. He puts makeup in their eyes and records how long it takes to destroy the corneas. He shaves them and applies nail polish to skin. He puts hand lotion into orifices. This is a real thing he does, for money.
The question she didn't mind, because questions, especially polite ones, are innocent enough. No, what Charette Cadet took offense to was his use of vous.
I gathered after five interviews that John was a people magnet and his personal habits were impeccable, but not one person could give me a definitive, sexual-harassment or work-not-up-to-par kind of reason for his being let go.
Dinner at La Grenouille by George Ayres
The Crow by Simon Barker
The Spectacle by Sean Beaudoin
Last Suppers by Marissa Coren
Curve by Andrea Drugay
Dinosaur House by Ali Fahmy
In the Eye of the Beholder by j.e. foster
Pat and Mike by Larry Gaffney
A Design History of Icebergs and Their Applications by Scott Geiger
When the Evening Reaches Here by Jessica Harwell
Dumb Lumbering Beasts by Kevin Keating
Third Lesson by Summer Block Kumar
New Amsterdam by Matthew Nishimuta
Break Through Whatever Happens to You by Jill Okpalugo-Nwajiaku
A Tangled Web by Ethel Rohan
An Evening on Peaceful Quiet Street by M. Marie Shank
As I Lay Wired by Tyler Smith
The Last Gasp Hotel Fiction by Kevin Spaide
Motor Repair by Scott Wrobel
The Vinegar Tasters by Barbara Zaragoza
All Her Father's Guns, by Identity Theory fiction editor James Warner