Fiction
How to Be Pretty
You need to eat. From birth to adolescence, amass an obscene amount of weight. Let the fat sag from your arms; let it trail behind every movement. Mind your hips. Mind them! Maneuver them around school desks and through turnstiles. Develop a scowl that envelops you. Obey it more than your brain, your heart, your […]
Endings
“He smiled a little and breathed in deeply. She was beautiful, he thought. Absolutely beautiful. And he was going to leave her.”
Iced Coffee’s Circles of Hell
1. The ice floating at the top of the cup is so beautiful. It makes shapes. The cubes twist and turn with every movement of the glass, even the slightest and shortest travel from the kitchen to the computer set up on a too-small desk in a too-small room. There’s no one else there, but […]
There’s A Weight In Her Bag
There is a weight in her bag. A weight that pulls at her shoulder blades and squeezes the muscles in her neck. Why don’t you take that goddamn weight out of your bag? her friends say. She shrugs. I don’t know. It keeps me at the ready. It’ll ultimately make me stronger. There is a […]
Upfaked Out of My Love Shoes
It was a New Year’s Eve in the ’90′s and I was at loose ends. I decided to skip the midnight show and go to a party with friends. After the obligatory dance with my hostess to her then-favorite popular song (If memory serves correctly, it was Lionel Ritchie’s “All Night Long”), I scanned the […]
from “The Scissor Man”
The following novel excerpt appeared, in slightly different form, in “Normal 2014: Collected Works from the First Annual DFW Conference,” an anthology published by Lit Fest Press / Festival of Language in 2015.
Anon.
A short story about the hacktivist group Anonymous that may yet become the first chapter of a novel.