By Victor Lodato
I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life. Like now, it’s night, not yet time for bed but too late to be outside, and the two of them reading reading reading with their eyes moving like the lights inside [...]

By Brad Tice
Lee Garvis remembered the exact mile marker of the weigh station and rest stop, its trucks lined up like cigarette cartons behind a low concrete building — and he remembered the trails in the woods behind the place where men wandered into underbrush and found each other. What he had not remembered, forgot [...]

By Margo Rabb
When you’re 15 and your dad goes in for bypass surgery, and your mom dies suddenly of cancer, it is only natural that feelings of life, death and love become all the more intense.

By Neil Smith
Before you get to heaven, you need to fly there. Welcome aboard.

By James P. Othmer
Henry Tuhoe is a 28-year-old middle manager. His wife loves the suburbs and the occult. His job is about to be exported to Bangalore. His secretary is an Internet porn star online. Welcome to his Monday.

By Richard Lange
With his Hollywood dreams on the rocks and his tequila straight, a would-be actor returns home to mom’s place in Riverside for a stiff shot of rehab and reality.

By Steve Amick
His wife was sexy, charming and cool. There was only one problem: she didn’t laugh at his jokes. Because she didn’t get them, of course. He was funny. Really. Everyone else thought so.

By Robert Boswell
(1983) The moon was an upturned and empty bucket, only its silver rim visible in all the darkness that had escaped. Don Spitzer knew a storm required clouds and wind and rain, but from his window, he could only see the bucket and the dark. The glass was dry. Who were they trying [...]

By Ellen Litman
There’s nothing like a trip back home for an old friend’s wedding — and staying with your parents — to make you reassess where you are in your own life.

By Tania James
Election Day.
Riya had prepared for this morning, for the 4 a.m. drive with Deedee at the wheel, both of them giddy with coffee and optimism until they pulled into the parking lot and squinting through the windshield, Deedee muttered, “Oh those a-holes.” Which a-hole exactly, they were not sure, but someone from the [...]

By Samantha Hunt
Ada moved from Rhode Island to Florida to begin again, but there was no way to escape what she’d left behind.

By Angi Becker Stevens
I wasn’t on the team that found the typewriter, though they called me out almost immediately. An intern met me near the road and drove me out to the site, our dune buggy sputtering its way over such an endless stretch of sand I was almost sure he had no idea where [...]

By Katherine Taylor
There would be great books, just not written by her. There would be great meals, only some of them eaten by her. And there would be great sex, even if the friendship would soon decay. Later, she would remember it all quite differently.

By Rudolph Delson
A guide to wooing the opposite sex by Maynard Gogarty, a companion piece to the novel “Maynard & Jennica.”

By Jessica Francis Kane
Sometimes when we move, it exposes the fault lines.

By Josh Emmons

By Joshua Furst
It’s Friday night on Bourbon Street. Grab a drink — the parade of desperate dreams is about to begin. Are those the first notes of “Satisfaction”?

By James P. Othmer
Monday: Live, But With No Audience Participation

The booths are supposed to be sound-proofed but as soon as Dewitt slips into the makeshift lobby he can sense it all around him, all forms of it, its myriad notes and shades, highs and lows, guttural and spontaneous, gloriously natural and desperately false, the [...]