11 min read stories

Sergeant Randall backed his pickup into the motor pool, got out, dropped the tailgate, and asked who all wanted a Coors. Several guys indicated they did, so...

Corporal Johnson had two fake front teeth. That was a detail about him. His two top-middle teeth had been installed by a dentist, recently, so they were a...

On certain nights, jackals were shotgunned to death on the mountain by men who waited for them. The morning guards got spoiled with beautiful sunrises. At...

I remember the summer I was thirteen. The Chicago Cubs had traded for veteran first-baseman Fred McGriff, whose role would be to support Sammy Sosa on the...

I shaved each morning in the Valley with a conventional razor, a metal canteen cup, one bottle of water, and a portable mirror. The Valley was a dry, windy...

Sara wished her brother dead. She wished old Pastor Brookes dead as well.

Annaliese wanted to conceive in the woods. We were wild animals, she said, and our baby would be wild too. Its creation should reflect that. So, she insisted...

For a while, there were rumors that a man in our neighborhood could grant wishes. My family lived on the Northside, on a street of tiny, near-identical...

It was Memorial Day weekend, and my friends and I were celebrating Clare’s last fling before the ring in Scottsdale, Arizona. While sitting poolside in a...

It was the night before Christmas, but all that meant to us was that no one else was out and the suburbs were our playgrounds more than ever. We were two...

I never could stomach Adams and then one day he’s standing in my kitchen, in his underwear. Facing in the direction of my kids’ room! So I wonk him in the...

I began to think, for no particular reason, about what the exact series of events would be were I to die at that moment – before, even, my coffee went cold.