It sounds like a dream but it’s not. In my day and age, a certain subset of trendsetters soured on the human face. Too many selfies, perhaps...

It would be nice to talk to him again. A nice, normal drink with an old friend. There weren’t many people I felt like seeing these days, and even fewer places I felt like going...

I. He says tell me we’re approaching JFK  without telling me we’re approaching JFK as the fasten seat belt sign illuminates I reply...

a picture on Facebook of the pumpkin latte I bought with money Juliet sent me but now it’s my profile picture Then I tried to write a post...

Lewie hunches over his boxy camera in one of the photo booths that have been gouged into the courtroom walls at Nuremberg. Peering through the rear screen of his Speed Graphic, he focuses on the American prosecutor’s hairline—the point of his widow’s peak, the lobes of bare scalp to either side, those graceful arcs glowing under the floodlights that have been hung from the arched ceiling...

Richard is standing at the trail’s edge, one he would often run when he’d lived in the Bronx, before moving to lower Manhattan. The turns are unfamiliar, winding in directions he doesn’t recall...

In this standoff there is cold, hard cash  on the plaster stove &  I look him in the eye. A magazine falls somewhere and he’s screaming louder now, his back to me, don’t take it don’t take it so I take it and I run and now I’m in a crowd of people  Sinking deep into the train I freeze I look to my right, nothing. I look to my left, you...

I would venture nearly everyone harbors some affront. An indignity that sides us instantly with the beleaguered— with the downtrodden, horses old and gaunt, lone woman on the board...

By the close of New Year’s Day 2030, every human inhabitant of the planet Earth had been fingered. It was no longer a big deal for anyone to cock thumb and extend index finger as if they comprised a real pistol and, with a simple BANG, shoot someone dead...

On my one and only trip through “the system,” I didn’t get any jail time. I was a first-time offender, and someone—white, middle class—the judges didn’t see as a criminal. They gave me community service...

To remove my pink jacket,   they had to break my arm— Our editors felt there needed to be a little more connection between ideas and images. We were a little confused by the direction some of these took...

What if you watched me all the time? Often I'm undressed Afternoons I gorge on SweeTARTS and watch YouTube at work. Red light tickets are fifty dollars but two hundred on a bike. I forget the Oxford comma, the cat box and my sink is messy.  My Bluetooth sex toy doesn’t want to pair. Long showers are problematic...

If you come home from work early, enter your living room to find DVDs in front of the TV that weren’t there when you did your laundry. If you need the laundry, need it now. If now you enter the kitchen, find hot cocoa on the counter, the counter you scrubbed earlier that day while waiting for your laundry...

Tax season was upon us. Somehow it took me by surprise every year, despite being one of life’s famous certainties, and as I rode the train uptown to meet my accountant I realized that I was even less prepared than usual. I had forgotten to bring some of the relevant forms, as well as my umbrella—it was a rainy day at the end of February— and I was running late...

Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama, a Catholic, has offered twenty-seven acres of prime real estate in his capital, Tirana, to the Bektashi order of Sufi Muslims, expelled from Turkey into diaspora a hundred years ago. They’ll have their own domain, the world’s smallest sovereign state, smaller than the Vatican...

We do not take him home baked cookies; we do not roll his emptied trash can back from the street to his porch We do not offer to loan him   our trimmer or give him our leftover mulch; we do not invite him to go to our church...

Somebody walks into a bar, says, “You suckers are luckers!” and orders two drinks, a double scotch on the rocks for himself and a Cuba Libre for Nobody. The bartender and two patrons at the far end of the bar watch as he slowly finishes his, pays...

When planning a menu of prison meals, it’s parts and labor. The parts are the ingredients; they have to be beyond cheap, available in great quantity, and built for simplicity. Which leads to the labor. A cheerless lot, the fewest number of steps to produce the highest yield is the design for inmate meals...

Kevin repeated Blue’s words in the form of a question. “Vanishing twin syndrome, as the name depicts, is a condition?”  Blue nodded.  Kevin said, “You have a condition?”  “No,” Blue said. “It’s nothing like that.”  Blue continued. Kevin listened.  When Blue finished, what silence allowed filled the room.  Kevin said, “Is this something we grieve?”...

Virginia watches the two pale headlights wobble their way up the hill. She knows the groan of Archie’s Chevy, the rusted creak of the axle in the potholes, the rattle of the wide, ancient truck-bed screaming threats of breaking from its body, of becoming wreckage, cleaved metal loping through darkness. She meets him on the porch and can tell by the way he hops out of the cab that he’s been drinking, his shoulders low, lupine, hunched forward in his mustard-tinged Carhart...