12 min read stories

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...

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...

Don’t you know how easy it is to visit someone in a nursing home? We told the man at the front desk the truth, or a version: she had been our teacher, and we...

Don’t you know how easy it is to visit someone in a nursing home? We told the man at the front desk the truth, or a version: she had been our teacher, and we...

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...

In a lovely urban coincidence, the last two houses on our block were both occupied by widows who had lost their husbands in Eastern European pogroms. Dad...

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.

Was it just because Keith’s upper arms wobbled as he shouted and fell; because he was – let’s face it – fat? Was that why ours rather than a billion other...

To give you some idea how seriously I took it, that’s what I called my first solo album.The public, if such a noble beast still exists, agreed with my low...