Recommended Reading From Online Magazines

Great new(ish) stories from around the Web. Forget work for a minute and read a story. It’s good for you.

– The houses are coming apart around here, piece by piece. The wind is a drunken sculptor, chiseling away the ornament. My boy comes home with his pants loaded with sand. There is grit in my bed, under my feet, in my cereal. My wife lives in sleep, and her lips taste like old licorice. Some days I wallow in remembrances of former, easier lives. — Todd Cantrell in the Collagist

– They’re pound dogs, rescued nine calendar years ago, the day they were to be put to sleep. The hippo hunter calls one Next, the other Then You, the forlorn humor of the Zambezi floodplain. He acquired the dogs to protect the rented television while he was away nights scrubbing truck stop toilets and attending naturalization classes. The dogs are now guardians of his sanity when he’s home behind plywood windows. — George Makana Clark in Witness

– I am writing a biography of Calvin Coolidge. I have a PhD in American Studies, but my books are targeted for the eight-to-fourteen age group. They have bright covers, are no more than two-hundred pages with many drawings and easy-to-read print. Cheryl, my ex-wife, has illustrated all my books. We have been divorced for five years but get along well. Neither of us has thought about remarrying, either to someone else or each other. We have never told our publisher about the split. The book jackets still have the two of us posed in a country setting replete with a tail-wagging black lab. We borrowed the stupid dog for the photo shoot. We both agree that pets are a bloody nuisance. We’ve contracted for three books this year, President Coolidge being the last. Two months ago we finished Franklin Pierce. Chester Alan Arthur was done weeks before that. This stop finishes our summer odyssey of covering the Vermont and New Hampshire presidents. — D.E. Fredd in LITnIMAGE

– Like if I watched you brushing your teeth, you pick up toothbrush this way, start on this tooth, move that way, spit, start there, that tooth…the same method every morning. You don’t believe me? Videotape yourself. You drive to work two ways. Two routes, maybe. Same roads/signs/stores/sky. You could easily take some other roads/paths, maybe 40. You would see 40 new things. But you don’t. — Sean Lovelace in HTML Giant

– Mitty and Carl Milton returned from their fortieth anniversary trip to Lookout Mountain to find their front and back doors kicked in, their dining room table split in half, couches upturned, flowerpots shattered on the sunroom floor, and a bloated, pruned man dead in their guest room shower stall. The man’s body slumped beside the shampoo rack, feet drooped over the doorway, the shower running, and a cord from the guest room blinds wrapped around his neck. — Anne Corbitt in One Story