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She stared at him in disbelief, which is to say she stared at her boyfriend in Disbelief, Nevada. Disbelief, named as such since no one believed its founder’s claims he was building a shining cit...

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Your failure saved the world, you know. Yes, you. The one reading this. This message has been distributed publicly so you won’t end up targeted, like shortwave broadcasts available anywhere but d...

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They say the place is thief-proof and that’s fair, it probably is, at least for certain definitions of “thief”. Even if you’re the greatest thief alive, as some say of me, which is also fair, I p...

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Autumn sneaks up and pounces like lightning, like a starved lion looking to fangoriously devour a gazelle caught unawares, one moment you’re daintily lapping at some idyllic pond, the next is all...

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Pete Best never got the chance to be full-on “Beatles” famous, he never got to be one of the four coolest dudes in the world for a handful of years, never chased by mobs of screaming girls, eithe...

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We can’t say, with any modicum of certainty, that prominent talk show host Rachel Ray has ever dined upon a human being’s flesh. That would be patently absurd to state, of course. Absolutely unp...

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Casinos have no clocks upon their walls, casinos have no windows at all, ugly carpets forever force us to look up at pretty blinking lights demanding we press our luck. It isn’t accidental, libra...

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When I was a young boy, the only thing I found interesting about my hometown was that we had an affiliated minor-league baseball team, the smallest city to have one. The lowest affiliate of the N...

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For a while before the COVID times, I worked in the one fancy-style coffeehouse within a wide radius, in a small farm-town along the Mohawk. I wasn’t great at the beautiful latte art part of it b...

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Our neighbor Walter seemed born-old to me, of course, because I was three when I met him. He lived with his father who may as well have been Methuselah, gnomic, Yoda-like, smoking a pipe on that ...

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Sophie would wander out, sometimes, to the holler in the countryside at the edge of town. It was the kind of place the old folks spoke of fondly, where she and her friends had run wild when they ...

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It could be better, it could be worse for Jemma Taylor, M.F.A. While most of her old grad-school comrades slave away as untenured adjunct professors, she fell into writing a gimmicky series of pa...

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The word is not the thing, of course, Korzybski, but the hope is that the word can at least gesture toward it. We use our words like B.B. pellets at a carnival shooting range, where one could nev...

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You must understand, I felt like a failure. Disappointed and lonely, didn’t know what to do. I’d accomplished all these things, made all these things but all I could feel was anxious emptiness. I...

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They say “necessity is the mother of invention”, and while that’s often true, it omits the part where necessity often also skips right past intention, how so many of our great leaps forward devel...

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At first, they were just thankful that there were no casualties and minimal injuries, all aboard able to walk away from the plane crash, probably due to the fact that sand dunes are far more forg...

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A lie’s just a story that won’t admit that it’s a story. A worst kind of story, an anti-story. I know for stories, they’re the only thing I’m any good at. Here we are within an age of lies, of do...

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The cliché is “Rome wasn’t built in a day” but what that chestnut neglects to say is that Rome didn’t fall in just one day, either. At its height, it’d become so vast and all-encompassing that th...

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Bruce Springsteen was born Bryce Sherrinford the Fourth, of the Kennebunkport Sherrinfords, graduated Yale, rumored to have been Skull and Bones president his senior year and only took on the wor...

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I was pulled from the earth by enslaved hands, in the beginning when I was just tufts of cotton, when all I wanted from life was to rise and spread seed, instead caught up with those men in the c...

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“Elective Cryogenic Hibernation”. That’s what the scientists called it. They’d theorized about it for generations, slowly evolving from whimsical fantasy plot-device (what was Rip Van Winkle othe...

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It all started when I died, which isn’t so strange, because everyone dies. Thing is, that’s where most stories end but where mine began. I was hauling cross-country, loaded with compressed gas, w...

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“That daring young man on the flying trapeze,” they sing up to me as I vault, they sing to me as I sign autographs after the shows, “flies through the air with the greatest of ease.” It’s nice an...

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I tend to not believe in the idea of “the muse” to get things done creatively. It’s part of the reason I don’t guard my smaller ideas, my short poems, comedy bits or one-off short stories with al...

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Dear Mr. Hemmingway, May we call you Ernest? Look, Ernest, we appreciate the work you’ve put in here but we’re going to have to pass on this manuscript as it currently exists. Your spare journali...

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