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We were sitting on the fifth floor of Will's dorm room, smoking pot, when the conversation turned to death."My sister, Elise, saw her boyfriend get killed in a car wreck," Casey said. She exhaled contemplatively, blowing a stream of smoke...
Thursday, 12 January, 2012
After the sex, he fell asleep. That wasn't what Linda had expected. Cheated - returned too soon into her own possession - she lay pinned for a while under his flung arm, looking into the corners of the high ceiling... More...
She didn't go the usual way. She walked more calmly and slowly than she normally did on her way home from work. He followed her. She went in and out of shops. She browsed and asked the shop assistants to... More...
I find her buried by a frangipani tree and I want to smile. These are the flowers she made into buttons as a girl and I think how lucky she is to be surrounded by these flowers, this scent. And... More...
Brighton Beach, 6 June 1955 The air is so big - stretches miles and miles - a sweep of pebbles up along the coast; the air a woompfh and a slap, and the sea growling itself up onto the pebbles.... More...
1942 The chill of the lino beneath Helen's bare feet seeps up her legs and underneath her nightie. She knows it is late from the feel of the air, still and silent as deep water. Head thumping and in need... More...
Someone was murdering the small animals of our neighborhood. We found them in the road outside our houses, and from far away they looked like the victims of careless drivers, but close up you saw that they were plump and... More...
Well before the mad rumours began swirling about; the ones about his wife walking out on him on Christmas morning and hauling their two kids with her back to County Antrim, Mr. Boyd was the teacher we feared above all... More...
I neither can nor want to resist the image of the still hours, those hours that resound both in and outside of me - these are the important hours. As was said a long time ago: It's then that the... More...
Back in the days when that was the sort of thing that did happen, Maurice McStay passed on details of his neighbour's car to another man he knew as a result of which the neighbour wound up dead. No one... More...
Diary: Aug 4th, 1979 When we got to Bath it was dark and late and there was nobody there to meet us. We rambled around for about an hour looking into every pub with livestock in the title: The Three... More...
Translator's note: this is an excerpt from Alberto Torres Blandina's hugely inventive Cosas que nunca occurrirían en Tokio (Things That Could Never Happen in Tokyo). The novel is narrated by soon-to-retire airport cleaner Salvador Fuensanta, who recounts fabulous stories about... More...
E.C. Osundo was born in Nigeria. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Fiction, Vice and The New Statesman, among other publications. He won the 2009 Caine Prize for African Writing, and holds an MFA from Syracuse University. He currently teaches at Providence College in Rhode Island. This is his first book. More...
Passing the actor's house one thought of biker films, of his former edginess, of his beautiful young face on the screen, of his slight lisp - eventually a trademark of sorts - and the way he stood, slightly to one... More...
It was a dark and stormy night, with the threat of rain moving rapidly in from the west. I glanced along the road, hoping that at any moment a pair of suitable headlights would appear. Two minutes passed. ... More...
Anna Borisovna Lomova, an old woman, had been allocated a room by the Dzerzhinsky district soviet; when she moved in, her complete lack of furniture, pots, pans, dishes, clothes and even bedding was a source of amusement to the other... More...
The gate was open when we got there. Someone had plowed the driveway recently, and the front steps had clearly been shoveled, but more snow had fallen and every surface appeared unbroken in the moonlight. The lace curtains were hospitable... More...
Time alone was hard to find in Alex's house. He timed his trips to the toilet so that he would have time to have a good look at himself in the mirror. Their house only had one bathroom, and most... More...
It was 4 a.m. and he'd fallen asleep in a most uninviting chair. A nurse woke him up. There was something about palliative care nurses that Pinsky liked - a sort of resigned kindness - a grace and an implied... More...
Susan stares at the road ahead, determinedly speechless, feeling lightheaded and tired and irritable. Beside her Richard drives with just one finger on the wheel as if to annoy her on purpose. Occasionally clicking his tongue against his teeth, barely... More...
The cold: that is how she knows. The cold and the pressure against the door as she tries to force it wide, as though a body were leant against it on the inside, slumped on the doormat with hunched back... More...
Thomas is weeding when it happens, when he hacks at the cheat grass and goosegrass choking his daffodils and rips up pubic clumps of the stuff with a garden claw that makes a silvery arc in the air when driven... More...
It began his first night on the boat, a scuttling in the head. He imagined them in the shower, in the sump, armies of them, coppered and searching, their antennas flexed. He was alone and it was otherwise very calm... More...
At my age, it only makes sense that I would think about the things that have influenced my unremarkable life. I have never formed the habit of thinking things through, so I have no idea of how to explain myself,... More...
TS knows precisely when it first came to him, the conviction. So powerful a feeling it was, like fresh blood rushing rudely through his veins, roaring in his ears, that he knew instinctively. Besides, how else could one know such... More...
One day I got myself lost in what was a very small town. It was an afternoon in late spring, and the sun was beginning to bake. I walked through a labyrinthine part of the town, having followed a twisting road that was taking me nowhere. More...
It is four o'clock on a warm August afternoon in Farley Green and I am sitting on my balcony with a cup of broken orange pekoe and one of those apricot biscuits Mina bakes me, and I am planning my... More...
In the summer of 1961, Henrietta Ramsey took part in her first ever scientific experiment. It was advertised in The New Haven Register, and offered four dollars for an hour of the respondent's time, plus fifty cents for bus fare.... More...
George Meadows was butterfly-hunting along Westheath when he saw a tall boy somewhat older than himself advance along the track, followed at a distance by a servant carrying a couple of dead rabbits and a gun. He knew the boy... More...
I met him in Hanoi three years ago, and we became sort of friends. We worked at the same private language school, teaching English to wealthy Vietnamese; but, like most people in that line of employment, he had other interests.... More...
On the day they finished moving the cemetery, Dona Josephina went to ten funerals. After eighty-eight years she full knew the strangeness of this world, yet knew also that attending ten funerals in one day was strange even by its... More...
Walking down our street at eight o'clock in the morning with my son James - he is shuffling along, resignedly. It's summer, there are only three days left of school, and Friday is a half-day anyway. His hair is a... More...
It was round about Christmas when Troy knocked on my door and told me that he was going to lose his arm. "The doctors told me they can't do nothing," he said. Troy had his arm up in a sling... More...
The essentials are these: when Tony was 16 and on a train between Johannesburg and Irene, where he then lived with his parents, he caught the eye of the man sitting opposite him and, before leaving the train, made an... More...
On the first day of the rest of his unemployment, Mr Simmons sat on the edge of his bed, the noose of his Monday tie limp in his hand, like an executioner who'd forgotten whom he was to hang. He... More...
PART I: FRANK That damn asshole who lived on the other side of the fence with his reindeer sweaters and the coffee mug finally met his maker the other day. To begin with, that fence is mine and everything on... More...
Septembers never used to be like this - and you'd think we might deserve a little relief after the string of heat waves we suffered this summer. Just when one week of feverish temperatures and choking humidity seemed too much,... More...
'Love's whole or else it's nothing,' said Shilpa. She lay the book face down on the bedside table, fixed him with her huge spaceship eyes and sighed, 'It's true, Bubaloo, isn't it?' She curled the hairs on his chest until... More...
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