Vi Khi Nao
Herman & Margaret
My father loved to bake, and he was lanky. He said he wished he could have like a hundred children.
Christopher Marnach
Death Week at the Funeral Card Company
There were slow times over the years, but heart attacks and house fires and America's penchant for foreign wars kept Trauer-Marsch in the black.
Perry Janes
Night Movers
The son of an insomniac, sleeping through the day was never a problem for me.
Tom Paine
Bagram
He was the sort of man who cleaned up his perimeter as he cooked, and he had always liked to cook.
Adam Schuitema
All of Your Vanished Men
They'd split up when I was in high school, and both remarried a few years later. By my mid-twenties--while I was finishing my student teaching and starting to date Amy--they'd both divorced again.
Chad Schuster
A Warning to the Cycling Community
This is the exact physical location where all of your life will be crammed into a few overheated sentences and burned into the blue-black sky.
Erin Kate Ryan
16 Things That Are True
I know the truth about who he used to be. And he's not that anymore. Or maybe not. Maybe everything just looks different from the other side.
Ben Fowlkes
Something Something Land Down Under
Who knew what could happen in two months? Who even knew if any of us would still be alive?
Jennifer Egan
Interview by Jeremiah Chamberlin
I felt like there was just no way that I could proceed with my education until this lack of worldliness was solved.
Lee Martin
A Man Looking for Trouble
We should have been talking about my mother and the fact that our family was on the verge of coming apart.
June R. Edelstein
Nails
Practice wood, Craig calls it, and it feels generous to Mary that he has laid it there, that he believes she can do it.
Jane Delury
Tomorrowland
"Here comes France," she told Clara. "Look for the Eiffel Tower." Anticipation thrummed in her chest.
Christopher Bollen
Yachts
I've hit on bad times. Bad is a subjective term, I know, much like gauging the damage of a fender bender to determine whether it's worth calling the police to file an official report or simply driving away in acceptance of human error.
Katherine Heiny
Leviathan
Audra had five events that differed in degrees of awfulness, and she was always using them as reference points, as though she were plotting all the events of her life on some chart.
Tom Dibblee
Stuck in a Sixth Floor Penthouse
A long silence stretched out between us. I wondered to myself whether I'd already told her.
George Makana Clark
The Sand Slum Gossips
A good gossip listens to all sides of a story before she passes it on, an undertaking that can stretch across lifetimes.
D.S. Sulaitis
Death Makes You Do Things
Once during a storm our ancient tulip tree snapped, falling on our electrical wires, and my father went outside, live wires dancing, a blaze of sparking white light and fire, and, arms out, frantic, he shouted, "Help the tree." We are like that, trees are Gods.