Category: Fiction

When Sarah Jones opened her eyes, the very first thing she noticed about the local Department of Motor Vehicles was the pervasive, defiant perfection. The immaculate office immediately struck her, the climate controlled setting blotting out the stifling memories of the trek from the asphalt parking lot. Her headache receded as she admired the emptiness…

I just got back with a shitload of red lights. You know, Christmas lights, my wife calls them twinkie lights. At the junk store they were 20 cents a box, dirt cheap, so I bought 170 boxes. 100 lights to a box, that’s a shitload of lights. I come in the house with as many…

For the Greeks, who had no word for irreversible death, one did not die, one darkened. —Mark Strand Where the Japanese iris right now stand ready to accept the inevitable purple blossom she found four dead mice in their nest of dirt and dusty fur all with their small ears pointed like pilgrims toward the…

What she didn’t understand, Miriam thought, what she really didn’t understand was this stupid cherry on a spoon. The huge sculpture sat there in its lake, its bright red cherry poised happily on the grey spoon-bowl’s ridge, a symbol of Minneapolis. What about it excited people? What, exactly, was the point? She sat on the…

He couldn’t help glancing at her legs. It wasn’t just that they were long and slender and perfectly tapered, or that she had swung one over the other and now tapped the air with a sling-back stiletto, or that they were smooth and tanned and flawless, but that they were bare. Like so many young…

One muggy Minnesota morning during the summer straddling the scrawny divide between my fanciful childhood and jaded adolescence, my best friend Robby and I found religion. It’d been hiding, not surprisingly, inside the whitewashed pine chapel of Lake Bronson Galilee Lutheran Bible Camp. Robby and I first met, with a magnetic force, five years earlier…