– The chicken farmer arrived at the chicken shack at five in the afternoon and looked in at his chickens, most of whom were sleeping. The chicken farmer felt sad feeding the chickens, as he knew that the chickens would eventually be eaten, or else the chickens would revolt against the chicken farmer and ransack his house, eventually overcoming the chicken farmer’s wife, and pecking out her eyeballs. — Justin Dobbs in Everyday Genius

– There was something special about seeing a blimp in the early sixties.  Only a few blimps were in existence, all owned by Goodyear Tires, and unlike airplanes that appeared only as vapor trails, a blimp flew low and lazy and dreamlike.  It took up a piece of sky, like a planet you could visit.  And it usually had a message, in electric lights across the side. — Lawrence Coates in Asent

– It was the Hay-on-Wye book festival in the early 1990s. I was wandering around the tents after my own event, wondering what else was on. The program that afternoon included a reading by two poets: one name I vaguely recognized, the other was new to me. As I passed that tent, I found that the poets were starting. I went and sat on my own at the back. — Colm Toibin in Brick

– The driver’s assistant threw bags of belongings to the roof and more passengers climbed aboard. The last to arrive was a healthy and large woman, in orange and purple cloth, carrying a baby. She stood outside the van and blew her nose on the ground by bending over, pressing the right nostril shut and propelling out what was in the left. Then repeating, pressing on the left. — Rachel Hoffman in the Literary Bohemian

– I tasted the memory, so bitter I needed to get some air. I walked out of the room to the backyard, then wandered into my son’s garage to distract myself with one of the small projects he’d left for me. But I couldn’t shake loose of thoughts of Andy. It felt like he was right next to me. The way it felt after he died. But he wasn’t an imaginary friend, he was really Andy. He came at night, telling me not to be sad, staying with me until I fell asleep. — Ann J. Brady in Miranda Magazine

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– I figured, fuck the noon. It wasn’t coming and I’d made my mind to walk. That’s when I spotted Rollins at the light. Sitting in a butchered car. The light was red and he was looking over his shoulder. Then the light greened, but the car stayed idle, and Rollins threw cagy glances all around, and drummed his hands against the steering wheel till the light went red again. — Brian Carr in 3:AM Magazine

– I hear it most in the getting-up. My life talking on the other end of sleep. How it boils over into a slow mess in the window’s sun. How the sun coming in here is coming in different than it would anywhere else in the world. Its bubbling up in front of me. Rising like I don’t know what. And the worst of it being the I don’t know what of it. Because I just really don’t know. — Corey Zeller in Keyhole

From Tin House

– The event weighed on me, though not in the way I expected. I was out in the middle of the department store floor contemplating a couple blow-up Christmas decorations to add to my menagerie, when I had what I guess you could call a flashback, except this one was like fiction. In it my wife and I were in bed, and we had been crying separately for an hour and had just drifted off to sleep when I heard someone downstairs, and so I got the gun and went downstairs and there he was, and I was on the stairs with my wife’s presence behind me, like I was guarding her from him, and when I shot him all I could see was light, and then she was gone, and it’s true, she is gone, she had gone, gone a while ago, and all I had left was light, and the house, her DVDs, the system, and my menagerie. — Ander Monson in Tin House

– He asked her to choose a shade of green. He liked the way she stooped to tie her shoes like an old man, as though she could fall over very easily.  “Go,” he said. The window was open and she screamed it. There was always a system to his punishments. He asked again. — Meg Pokrass in elimae

– At the club, Sarah goes by Sierra. The manager gave her the name the day she was hired four years earlier. He asked if she had a preference but she shrugged, took a sip of warm soda, told him to knock himself out. He looked her up and down and up again. “Sierra,” he said. “So you’ll turn your head when your name is called.” — Roxane Gay in The Collagist

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– My second year here on the playa, I met two others—Raymond and Sport, a gay couple, Australian. They were wandering the Americas on foot and riding the occasional Greyhound. I happened by them in my Honda as they hitched their thumbs from the roadside. We drove some, and then sat facing the sun for two days. We didn’t speak much, our eyes scanning the flat ground beneath us. Some, like Ray and Sport, leave the playa and never come back. Others return for two years, three years. And some just keep on coming. — Scott Cheshire in Agni

– In the parking garage, Matt sees Julie’s car and parks a level above. He knows he’ll have to avoid certain people—Julie’s friends Carla and Whitney, along with any mutual friends who might be there unexpectedly. If he wants to spy, he needs to be invisible. At the entrance, Matt shows his ID to a tall beefy bouncer, a bald white guy, who lets him inside, where the techno is loud and the lightshow is in full swing. — Jason Jordan in Night Train

– So the important thing to know from the start is that she was miserable. She hadn’t always been, of course—she’d gotten married in a flurry of sex and promises and she’d worn a white dress so hideously confectionary that she felt like a parody of herself, a joke told in crinoline and lace, and even that made her happy, because it was silly and she knew they’d laugh about it later. Which they did. — Alix Ohlin in Failbetter

Belly Dancing: Good For The Hips

– The regulars know each other but are friendly to the newcomers. Many have been taking this beginning belly dancing class for more than a year. “It’s hard,” they say; “You could be a beginner forever,” “Good for your hips; the tissues knit together when you get old,” they say. “It’s not about entertaining men,” says the one with the vagina backpack. “It’s about empowering yourself as a woman.” — Leslie F. Miller in JMWW

– We were carving a warpath all over the city. We’d sneak into theaters for shows like Stomp by claiming to be reporters for The SF Bay Guardian, into gyms to make-out on weight benches and fondle each other in pools, and outside the city to hot springs by vaulting fences. We tested sea-saws and climbed swing sets in parks. We were on a park tour. — Shane Kraus in Our Stories

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9/14/09

–  Every April 1st, my middle school has “Backwards Day.” Our eighth period classes become our first period classes. The cafeteria starts you off with dessert, and you finish with Yankee pot roast. Some of the teachers actually wear their clothes backwards, and Mr. Rosales, our principal, gives his annual address in the auditorium starting with the last sentence first. — Tai Dong Huai in the Apple Valley Review

The Rain Slides Down Invisible Strings

– Through the panoramic view of his window he watched raindrops fall in so perfect a pattern it was like they slid down invisible strings.  He thought about how long these strings would have to be and they would have to be very long indeed, there would have to be kilometers of them climbing all the way up to the surging clouds overhead.  That was much too long and there were really no strings, he was sure.  If there were, how could they not sway in the wind and swing and spin around each other before finally ending up in hideous knots?  Then who would unravel them?  And how long would it take that person? — Calvin Nguyen in Babel Fruit

– We were driving back from San Diego, through one of those spectacular Pacific sunsets where the emblazoned clouds streak above the highway, like a fire to end the world so beautiful that you might be happy to be consumed by such gilded flames. — Nicholas Hogg in Carve Magazine

– We pray but I don’t know what that means, to pray, so I hold and push my fingers together to see how numb they can get while everyone and me, we are supposed to be praying. My fingers tingling back up to the third knuckle. Their coming awake, its needling, pins. We pray. — J.A. Tyler in decomP

– I watched them from my bedroom window. Tall as our house, the tree stood between the street and the sidewalk, a green splash among asphalt and concrete. From my window, I could see that the crown was bare, just dead wood, though from below it looked healthy. Its leaves nodded and danced when the wind blew. A woodpecker lived in it. Every morning, even that one, I heard his jackhammer echo. — Adina Davis in Frostwriting

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8/31/09

– When you’ve finished beating someone to death, it’s usually important to clean up properly. Vital, in fact. With messiness comes discovery, and for most people discovery proves to be a bad thing for their career prospects. — Ian Wood in Thieves Jargon

– It was my job to bring the old ladies to life—the stained mahogany boxes, the rows of broken black and white keys, many of them true ivory—and to restring the cluster of notes one, two and three octaves above and below middle C. It took patience and vision to recover what someone’s great-aunt, who’d thumped out hymns since 1942, beat out of the Chickering upright that took up half the family parlor, back when people knew what a parlor was. When the flesh-and-blood little lady passed on, her nephews and nieces had no idea what to do with the huge music box, which by then had collected potted plants and cat fur, like jungle real estate. — Robert Warner in anderbo

Old Rides, New Neighborhoods

– The car ride seemed longer than I remembered. I was so antsy with anticipation that the second Charles stopped the car, I bounced out. Charles could not keep up with me – he couldn’t even walk with me as I crossed the street, I was just that fast. It wasn’t until I paused to allow him time to pay for our use of the court that he caught up. I scanned the area, hoping to see familiar faces. — Norma Boucher in Cadillac Cicatrix

– She forcefully inhales the man’s hot, ashtray flavored breath; the only thing strong enough to cover up his vomit inducing body odor.  The music from the house party downstairs blares loudly causing the cheap flower pictures in the bedroom to vibrate crookedly on the wall. Beads of sweat drip off the man’s balding forehead and rain down on her chest as he un-rhythmically fucks her on an old waterbed. The wooden frame of the aqua filled mattress creaks with his every unfulfilling thrust, keeping her mind miles away from satisfaction. — Wendy Ashlee Coleman in the Evergreen Review

– By the time the sun was over the ridge, Carl Veltre had already been up for three hours. He had milked the Holsteins before Lynne was awake, washed down the milking house while the kids were eating breakfast, and brought the school bus around to the house just as Lynne was handing lunch bags to their two boys and sending them down the driveway. — Josh Weil in Narrative Magazine

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8/17/09

– I was down in the basement, ineffectively lifting ten-pound weights, chinning myself on a beam that left spider guts on my palms. I heard someone coming down the stairs and, embarrassed, I put my shirt back on, sat down on the concrete. My father squatted next to me on his heels, staring around the darkness. He asked if things around the house had been tough for me the past few months, and I shrugged and mumbled that things were way tougher at school. The water heater came on, sounding like it was clearing its throat. “Your mother’s telling me to leave,” my father said, and he started to cry. I was embarrassed for him. I felt like I was ten years older than he was. — Matthew Grice in the Apple Valley Review

– Yasha thumped his foot anxiously on the couch, frustrated that he could not see his interlocutor. Doctor Altermann was a dogmatic and unwavering Freudian. He sat behind Yasha as the latter reclined, ridiculously, on a daybed lined with crackling leather. The ontological status of evil was their traditional sticking point. Yasha felt his therapy was going nowhere. — Eric Maroney in Arch Literary Journal

Cigarette by Jon Lasser

– The woman with red lipstick looked down. Her cigarette had burned all the way to its filter, the tobacco nothing more than grey ash. She lit another, took a long drag, and set it to smolder next to its cremated pack-mate. — Jon Lasser in decomP

– Way back when, Walt had temporarily staved off depression by driving to the animal shelter to get a puppy. It had been his 30th birthday, and he hadn’t wanted to spend it alone (not counting his mother, of course). He hadn’t anticipated cage after cage of confused, eager, dejected faces. — Kristy Athens in Babel Fruit

– Through no volition of his own, Blair felt his legs fling over the edge of the bed and hit the floor. He fought the other mind, struggled to move his body in the opposite direction but, despite his age, the other man was stronger and was winning the fight to drag the two of them towards the doorway. — Laura Solomon in Frostwriting

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8/3/09

– Naked in faculty housing, sniffling and spitting,

the Nobelist in biochemistry reassembles himself

from the calamities of sleep, caring for his teeth. — Oliver Rice in Mudlark

– Solely and thus sorely did he row off the disk of the sun that the lake reflected and into the dark of the piling-held dock where many-legged water- and not just water life lived, where he lived, when he could. — Terese Svoboda in Failbetter

Art School Confidential, by Daniel Clowes

– Daniel Clowes, who was born in Chicago in 1961, was by his own estimation a “shy, loner, bookworm kind of kid.” After studying art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Clowes graduated in 1984 with few career prospects. — Daniel Clowes in McSweeney’s

– You read me with your beady, jaundiced eyes. Ah!—you sour and doddering parliament of hexed owls hooting whatnots. I’d sell your precious “Freedom” for a song….For a moment’s peace. — Kane X. Faucher in Mad Hatter’s Review

– The two of you pass the salt and the TV remote, sleep back to back barely touching, not knowing how to do more than politely navigate around the shared sorrow. It’s like a new country with fragile borders. He mows the lawn on Saturdays and trims the edges. You watch from the window and wave when he looks up. He tells you he misses you, and the words sound like they’re traveling across miles of water. –Victoria Melekian in Word Riot

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7/27/09

– In August 1968, a visiting minister from Pakistan gave Chairman Mao a basket of mangoes as a token of the friendship between the two states. The Chairman, who was very particular about what he ate, did not care for the taste of mangoes, so he sent them to the worker-peasant Mao Zedong Thought propaganda team. The workers, flattered and overwhelmed by the Chairman’s love, preserved the mangoes in formaldehyde and revered them as sacred relics. — Jie Li in Cerise Press

– Ben and Michelle Hawthorne have an arrangement, a careful and longstanding division of the labors that allow the Hawthorne household to thrive: he makes money and she gives it away. — Leslie Haynsworth in Clapboard House

– There were three of us — me, reporter Matthew Treder and photographer Jared Paben. Technically it was Treder’s story, but naturally we were all very interested — a major nationwide sensation was brewing up right in our own back yard. — Finn John in Etude

Welcome to the Hamptons! by Thomas Cregan

– The driver backed out. They drove by large houses with rolling lawns until they went over a little bridge into an open area with fields of emerald-green corn stalks. Then the fields ended and the hedges began—those high Hamptons hedges that Lewis had heard about. — Thomas Cregan in anderbo

– Come in on the train that only approximates time, with a woman’s magazine you’ll leave behind on the seat you had all to your own. Instead of reading, you’ll say you rode to a song in your mind. (“Night and Day” or maybe “My Funny Valentine.”) — Stuart Dybek in Narrative Magazine

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Didn't I Tell You?

Rascals. All of us. Especially this Monday, what with Halloween behind us. Granted, we subscribed to our hermetic philosophy and did absolutely nothing for October’s ghoulish holiday. But still, we imagine many of you are struggling this morning — with makeup, memories and tummy aches. Nonetheless, the DSM furnace burns on. Here’s the skinny: Raymond Carver did not like sappy publicists trumping his words. Still, he’d be happy with the second life of his most famous book. William T. Vollman is a mental estuary. Drink up what you can. Who here, right now, wants to talk about women’s rights? Nobody? Us neither. Read Splice Today’s take on why it still matters. Google remains the thorn that for-the-love-of-Christ will not come out of the publishing industry’s skin. An academic from south Florida wins a literary prize, Dorothea Lange looks back at the real Great Depression, and the detective story is dead. In closing, Ayn Rand’s putrid prose is re-evaluated. All we learn is what we already know: she’s kinky, she’s bold. Freshen up, kids. A new, costume-free week dawns. — Kevin Murphy

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