short-stories

A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

Though this child came in with nothing but excess baby fat, chemical brain waves, and mother and son bodily toxins on his legs, he had a fate fit for a modern day demigod.

I am content when writing short stories.

A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Penn Station every morning. (Dark City Lights)

I hated seeing these spasmodic upside-down chicken heads stretching to puncture my flesh. I imagined once that they reached my groin and pecked out my penis and my huevos and kept pecking until they got to my gut and my eyes and my brain, until I was just a pecked-out piece of human meat surrounded by thousands of nervous, dirty white chickens. I think that was about the time I fucked up a pair of chicken heads against a warehouse wall when no one was looking. Well, almost no one. Rueben was right behind me, and that's when he grinned his stupid grin. Maybe he hated the chickens as much as I did. Maybe he just knew que ya me iba también a la chingada. Maybe I was going on my first joy ride to hell and back, and it was fun to watch.

All stories are the sin of their weaver.

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

I imagine I should have told it to you before? I love you, Sejal.I wish for you to become my wife.Recently I__e also opened a shop in North Dakota and thinking that, just maybe, you love me too.

I__e been asking you to marry me since we met! What more do you want?

Gabrielle chuckled, her dark eyes twinkling. __o he__ been after you, has he? Poor Etta, pursued by a sun priest offering to pleasure__ __very nook and cranny,_ Marietta interrupted dryly and Gabrielle tipped her head back with a throaty laugh.

On a far-flung parcel of government land situated somewhere in the vast reaches of parched American western desert sits an abandoned and long forgotten government facility known as Lost Cactus. That is what the shadowy agency ~ that operates there to this day ~ wants everyone from presidents on down to John Q. Public to believe.

I hate that I got dealt shitty parents! I hate how you make me feel like scum! I hate that you__e always running away from me! And I hate that I ever fucking gave you the power to destroy me!

You know, the world is all about balance. You lose something here... maybe somebody else picks it up over there.

Once when I asked you if you still loved your wife, you said, Love leaves the back door open. Later, you said, Love like a hospital gown opens at the back. And you slipped out.

The weakness of a man is the strength of a woman

Death, is a beautiful conclusion to these short stories, that which we have so interestingly entitled, lives.

Even if this spring the dappled leaves should shelter our minds from the moon's pale echo we would still remember how once they were sheltered by our skulls only from the day's sun and the night's stars and never from what we feared and what we remembered

She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one's child was the exception rather than the rule.