31 min read stories

Jim McCrumb always told the same stories to every new batch of student employees. Jim had been a manager at the university bookstore for a long time. He...

Perhaps their bodies sensed the heartache ahead, the disappointment that waited—that they couldn’t hold onto this version of reality. So they let go of it.

Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Alison Pope paused at the top of the stairs.Say the staircase was marble. Say she descended and all heads turned....

“Drip on?” Abnesti said over the P.A.“What’s in it?” I said.“Hilarious,” he said.“Acknowledge,” I said.Abnesti used his remote. My MobiPak™ whirred. Soon the...

Three cars for two grownups, I thought. What a country. What a couple of selfish dicks my wife and her new husband were.

Well, if he wanted a fight, she knew how to fight. She liked it. She was good at it. She’d make him pay. The way she always had.

Many years after her husband had died, Nwamgba still closed her eyes from time to time to relive his nightly visits to her hut, and the mornings after, when...

In London, night came too soon. It hung in the morning air like a threat and then in the afternoon a blue-gray dusk descended, and the Victorian buildings...

The woman, a stranger, was looking at me. In the glare of the hot afternoon, in the swirl of motorcycles and hawkers, she was looking down at me from the...

Here she is, on the porch, all straw-hair and slumpy joints and a crack that passes through her lip like she is dirt that has never known rain. In her arms...

As they put me to sleep, my mouth fills with the dust of the moon. I expect to choke on the silt but instead it slides in and out, and in and out, and I am,...

Set in Paris. This is a story of love and murder, and a little voodoo.