Fiction

“As your brother, I ask you, how did you get that scar on your face?”

There would be no one to live for; she would live for herself.

“The secret to happiness is not wanting,” Lars told the Buddha.

He was warm that way, always tender, and maybe that’s the worst part.

He glowered even as a little child. Maybe because he has your bad eyes.

He was trying to seduce me with his history, which was mine as well.

Her bra is black, her breasts full and white. There is too much flesh.

For a month after 9/11 Bella wept through all her appointments.

Like New York City, the factory was circumscribed but infinite.

Take this man, Stepan. His deep mellow voice soars in my heart.

The people flocked to witness the execution of Ja’afar and his kinsmen.

He will be unable to resist his manias for symmetry and completion.

At a red light he touches his cheek. The stubbly skin is sensitive, febrile.

I found myself alone on the train in possession only of Knoll’s journal.

No parent has yet been born who can save a child from childhood.

“I—I am Martin Eden,” Martin began. (“And I want my five dollars.")

We were young and lived wild lives in the delightful city of our sojourn.

Her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores.

Gary Sturm

The three of us share a myth, that I’m fragile as old bones. My parents speak in low voices—about me, I’m pretty sure. I watch the waitress, trying to remember how to flirt. I take off my mask.

He pushed aside a photograph of a man with a knife stuck in his eye.

He cut down on beer and moved into the hotel that had my name.

When I think on it, I can’t believe I’m going to kill two people over weed.

The golden-haired ones, they think they’re better than Virgin Mary.

“Hey, you look lost,” the hunter had said. “You better come with me.”

The boys searched for their father, lost somewhere in the Olympic Range.

She wonders if he will be all right. She assumes he has four-wheel drive.

You never see Westerners, so you don’t think of them as human beings.

He didn’t mind, he insisted, that he loved her more than she loved him.

Somebody would be a lot happier if she were more like her mother.