Through the darkened distance, he could see light—not natural, but neon radiance, a bright beacon of promise hastening them toward salvation. He sat in back with his brother, made uneasy by the endles...

It was lonely on that road at night. I’d walk along the shoulder; there were no lights of any kind. Passing cars with their headlights--I hoped they could see me in the dark. I would have liked one to...

It’s Greenwich Village in the summer of 1960. Paul looks out a bedroom window, superstitious about missing a call from his former girlfriend, Cassia. He’s rarely out of range of the phone, he’s so anx...

The neighborhood gang hung together, played together, stayed together. In the parks and playgrounds, to the Saturday matinée at the Dreamland, along sidewalks where we knew every crack...

The interior wall of our living room had been refashioned into a seven foot high bookshelf, and its lowest shelf held the 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary...

Sixty-two and an only child, I sit alone in my car at the curb taking a last look at the house...

It’s hopeless if the cubes settle on the bottom of the glass. A straw can pierce a cherry only if there’s enough Coke left for the ice to float and the angle is exactly right...

My name is Mark Raskin, or it was when I was alive. Or it still is. I'm not sure how that works. My dad died before I was born...

The wind blows hard enough to rattle your bones, lifting dust from dried mud and lodging it in your throat until you cough up something thick and metallic..

Many years ago, a young girl was lying in the middle of the storm. Her parents' shouts and yells caused the trees to bend and their stomps the house to shake...

We are in a psychiatrist’s office lined with books. A man, BRADNEY, is lying on the proverbial coach whilst speaking with his DOCTOR…

I sat tensely in the witness box, my vision and hearing narrowed to a rectangle that ran from me to the judge. The rest of the courtroom, including my husband leaning forward on the edge of his seat i...

No one felt at ease when the man entered the house. Ludmila would poke at the fireplace logs, which the late Mr. Frederico used to light on stormy days...

After the three-hour drive from our third-floor walkup in Brooklyn, we turn onto a short, unpaved track and I get my first glimpse of the shimmering lake. I study the six tidy, white cottages on a gra...

His father said he was only going in for one. He said it through the half-open driver’s window with the easy certainty of a man saying something he expected to be believed because he had said it often...

Your daughter—yes, we have two little mini-mes—asked me the other day: “What do you wish you had when you were younger that you didn’t have?” And it made me think of you...

There are weeks in a life that you recognize, even as they happen, as something you will carry forever. We have had our share. But if Beth and I had to name one—one week above all others...

Falling into a black hole, a dying star gets pulled apart. On a faraway planet the wise men wonder:...

by Peter Abrahams

“Don’t tell a patient that it will be okay.” Our nursing professor strolled the aisles of the cramped classroom one hand clutching her cane. The walls were dusty pink, and we sat at rickety desks, the...

My parents weren't art connoisseurs nor were they culturally clueless. My mother owned a Peter, Paul and Mary LP. Occasionally she would pull out a boxed set of La Bohème records, a gift from her moth...

They thought they murdered me. Six boys stood above me with shovels, circling a mound of wet sand. I was buried under it, trapped. It’s weight pressed into my chest and pinned my arms...

“Are you mad at me?” I asked while slicing cucumbers at work. I had it down to a science. They had to be cucumbers-cucumbers, not squash or zucchini, because those spoke to the mandolin the best. “No,...

Children are signposts for those of us who give birth to them, adopt, or foster them, care for and teach them. They lead us all into worlds we may never have encountered...

TSome Things That Have Stayed Pretty Much the Same Since I Was a Boy: Snickers, The three broadcast networks, Alcohol content of beer...

Stephen King once wrote that there are easy reads, but there are no easy “writes.” When people respond with pearl-clutching to your book on Goodreads, you respond by liking their bad reviews...

There are few people who elicit strong enough emotions to write letters to. So maybe you’ll appreciate this, since you enjoy eliciting strong emotions just for the sake of it. I think you’re obligated...

You're expecting wisdom. Some hard-won insight I'll be grateful for later, delivered backward through time like a telegram from the wreckage. If only I'd known. That kind of thing...

We were in the middle of our math lesson on the morning of Valentine’s Day when I felt a sudden energy shift in the fifth-grade classroom, the air bristled with an electricity that had not been there ...

Her eyes are hidden behind their damp lids, blocking out whatever might enter her room this time. Tucked into the crook of Charlie’s arm, as if being strangled, is her stuffed...

It’s entirely his fault he’s dead. That much, I think, is beyond question. He didn’t deserve a life to live out—at least, not the kind he pretended to lead. He earned his demise, whether anyone wants ...

I reach into the shower, turn the shower knob to hot, wait a few seconds, and step in. Ahhh. Now how good does this feel? I close my eyes and rock myself, gently, side to side, letting the water rain ...

When I was young, I was lucky to be accepted into a Seven Sisters college in Massachusetts. In the 1970s I looked forward to escaping from under my parents’ roof...

On my last night as a student midwife, I donned my dread along with my scrubs. My car no longer smelled like weed. I had long since kicked the habit. When I arrived, tealights glittered in the birth s...

The office was thinning out when Omer finished the last items on his list. His phone rang as he was slipping into his coat. “Still there?” Emre asked.......

Call me Johno. You watch enough movies, you come away with the idea that nobody has ever committed the perfect crime. Everybody, even the very smart and the very lucky, makes one mistake, and there’s ...

We’re interested in writing for its own sake, not based on who else loves you, so our contributor’s notes don’t list your past publishing credits or your...

The forest is pine-wood and flat. The kind with stag and pheasants, red and fat, flitting through the trees. The kind with long furrows—even scars that were once tilled by broken-backed villeins...

On our third date we met in the desert. I sat in the mass produced macrame swing hung at an awkward height with my legs sticking out at strange angles while Carol Cole played on the cheap all in one r...

I sat in the driver’s seat of the car, silently fuming as I watched my dad struggle to put on his seatbelt. With one mobile arm, he feebly reached for the seatbelt across his right shoulder to buckle ...

WAY OUT OF town, beyond the Abbey and the seagulls, Eskdale lay sandwiched between an industrial estate and a thin slice of sixties housing. Every day I bumped-and-trundled in by train; my friend...

Ever since my skating coach Cecilia said I wasn’t worth teaching and I wet my pants in my lesson...

On a blistering day in late July, a few weeks after my husband’s death, slightly maddened by fresh grief and by a jolting sense of possibility...

Hank and I had been awake long enough that the apartment felt borrowed. It was a three month rental north of Prospect Park, probably one block into Greenpoint, but I still told people...

What was it like to be considered a foreigner in your birthplace of Vienna because your father was from Turkey? Did you feel Viennese or Austrian or Turkish or none of the above?...

Laika was only as wise as that one revolution, the Carnation revolution in April 1974, in Portugal. The others had happened before her time...

“Sometimes, to be funny, one must lie a little,” said the Fox in The Little Prince. This would also be a fair way to describe my dad’s approach to storytelling...

The Woods Hole Wall: It’s always a traffic summer. I’m 14, sitting the wall, watching tourist TV. A man in an old Pontiac sees me, leans across his son. 'Where to park?' he says; big smile...