Grandma gets her episodes at least once a month. She’ll grow out her jaws and if it happens on a rainy day, claws will tear out of her fingers.
Café Mozart Dreamin’ by Tracey Meloni
Judie bangs on my hotel door. “The dressmaker is here! Hurry! You have Christmas lunch with Noah at Café Mozart at 1PM!”
Conversation in Hotel Lounge by Lydia Davis
Two women sit together on the sofa in the hotel lounge, bent over and deep in conversation. I am walking through, on my way to my room.
Initiation by Stuart Dybek
The doors snap open on Addison, and the kid in dirty hightops and a sleeveless denim jacket that shows off a blue pitchfork tattooed on his bicep jogs forward beneath a backward baseball cap and grabs the purse off a babushka’s lap.
Hermit & Bleeding Faucet by Ana María Shua
With the population now well aware of the physical and mental benefits of asceticism (low cholesterol, bradycardia, a delicate sense of happiness, spiritual fulfillment), everyone wants to become a hermit.
The Girl In Purple by Bobbie Ann Mason
Near dawn, Dennis Moore saw the iron gate to the courtyard inch open and the wisp of a girl squeeze through, clanging the gate behind her. Two minutes later, on the boardwalk, she halted as if for an invisible dog, then resumed her dog-walker gait. He followed her...
Fun House by Robert Scotellaro
She’d gotten the fun house mirrors at an auction and had them put up in the spare bedroom.
Their Closet by Pamela Painter
“What are you thinking?” her husband asked her. In their twenty years of marriage he had never asked her that.
Lady Gaga Considers the Shrimp Scampi by Steve Almond
There were fifty thousand little monsters screaming for an encore, Spaniards, Germans, skinny little French boys, Italians making wet sounds with their tongues.