Category: Fiction

There is a Thomas the Tank engine train track table in the corner of the waiting room. Alice has pulled her hands from her ears, and some color has come back to her. Teddy pushes the train cars around the track and smiles, even...

In our family, Great Uncle Roger was what used to be termed the “black sheep.” He was eccentric, asocial, and a bit of a recluse. But when I met him at weddings, funerals, and the like, he always seemed to me to be quite cool. I...

I walked in from work, and checked my voicemail; “Hi Elaine, my parents are inviting us for dinner next week. Will Friday work for you? Love you.” Well, it’s meet-the-parents time. I was pleased. Tim’s...

Keith inhabits a basement apartment full of books. Trapped underground for longer than he cares to admit, surrounded in every direction by remnants of decades long since passed, piles of books stacked haphazardly around his...

She wanted her lover to cut her hair. He was in the habit of cutting his own with electric clippers, which was easy enough to do, since he was pretty bald on top. He always refused her requests to cut her hair, though, because...

It was somewhat insane for me to think the unusual out of the ordinary occurrence would ever happen in a common place. This place for me was a bench outside the local store, and as a kid almost every day during the summer, I...

After Diana lost her job, she had trouble paying rent. Unemployment money came in, but it barely covered food for her and her teenage son, Cody. She would cook rice and beans. Soak the beans a day in advance. Cheap. It felt...

Everyone said the place was haunted. But after the week I had, I didn’t care. The old house was secluded, and I needed to be alone. Dad got drunk for the third time that week. He yelled. I yelled back. My sister hid. Mom cried....

“Didn’t want to bother you,” she said one rainy afternoon, to Meredith, her only child, who lived in sun-drenched San Diego, a whole country away. “It was just the right time for us.” Jen decided to ignore the repeated beep...

The encrusted layers of semi-gloss antique white paint made the electric buzzer in our apartment squawk like an aging parrot. The aural intrusion was always on time every third Wednesday of the month. Egidio Mello, an insurance...