Pretend
On a perfect fall day in a park in the city, three children play on a patch of grass. The smallest one lies on the ground, two bigger ones running in circles around her. “Hey guys, pretend you thought...
View ArticleFly
A drunk college student watches a fly crawl into an almost-empty bottle of red wine sitting on a coffee table in the living room of a shared suite. He leans forward and corks the bottle, trapping the...
View ArticleBirthday
A mostly unsuccessful middle-aged writer published an essay on the Internet entitled “Against the Celebration of Birthdays and Gift Giving Amongst Adults In General.” The next year, when his own...
View ArticleStairs
An old woman and her grandson are walking down the wooden steps leading from the deck of a beach house to the driveway. They’re holding hands but the old woman misses a step and tumbles forward and her...
View ArticleForest
I was jogging once on a dirt road that cut through a forest. It was quiet and each of my footsteps landed with a soft crunch. Eventually I came upon a man walking with a big walking stick. It was a...
View ArticleMorning
A woman stands behind a counter wearing a button that says, “Good morning!” Her job is to sell people coffee and donuts and egg-and-cheese sandwiches. The bells on the door jingle and a man in a suit...
View ArticleHurt
On line at a grocery store, a woman with a pierced eyebrow and white earbuds in her ears talks into the hands-free receiver attached to an iPhone jutting out of a back pocket of her blue jeans. Her...
View ArticleOuija
A man saw a Ouija board for sale at a department store and bought it because he and his wife had been thinking about their son, who had been killed in a car accident almost a year before. They were...
View ArticleLeaves
At the end of the day, outside of a nursery school, a young boy wanders away from his teachers and classmates and buries himself beneath a mound of leaves that have accumulated in the circular...
View ArticlePharmacy
A man walks into a pharmacy. It’s a new business, having just opened its doors in a building on the corner of his street three months ago. He has been in the store at least once or twice a week since...
View ArticlePickles
Two men around the age of forty sit at a bar. It’s October and late-afternoon sunrays shine through a big plate glass behind them, playing in the glass of their green beer bottles. One of them takes a...
View ArticleDog
Two couples sat in a restaurant having dinner together. They were old friends, but haven’t seen each other in a long time. One of the men had lost his job in the months that had passed since. The man...
View Article4
A woman struggles to pick up a baby stroller at the top of a stairwell leading down to a subway station in New York City. She is wearing a large purse—almost more like a duffel bag—slung over her...
View ArticleExpect
A man who writes on the internet for a living receives an email message from a colleague of his with the words “the irony” in the subject header field. He clicks it open and it says, “…of writing...
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