Explore

In the story she was a dripping, chocolate-covered vamp.

You’re certain that they’re harmless, benign as a flock of founding fathers.

When I was a woman, I was all reason and my reason was unjust.

Take my hand, lead me by heart over the blind stepping-stones to the edge.

I give you a real blue song the mountains hold under their foot.

Marie was Indian, and everything Indian required patience.

I shouldn’t have to say why the confederate flag is a symbol of hate.

Children can be seen as worldly things, not as souls with broken mirrors.

A cuckoo calls the hours like an old clock, only not the hours we mean.

Silence, a weapon of choice, hung between them, cut through the air.

What if white men became supremely good at making up for our past?

Come live with me. We could plant acorns in each other’s mouths.

They met on the app in April, shortly after her twenty-ninth birthday.

Oh, how did people do it? How did they find some way to be happy?

It was the season of storm delays, of . . . shame and ghosts on trains

The first time she’d touched his body, it had been like going back in time.

"In County": A new six-word story by Robert Olen Butler.

Make haste, my love, I am redrawing the scale of escape.

When you are a father, want sons. There is some math in this.

Those moments are all I want. I want a life of this. He sighs and I sigh.

It’s raining concrete. I bite my grief wetly. Who will test these chains?

Jennifer Haigh

The ashes of a human being are not ash. The body burns into wood.

Blacked-out little angel, you shuffle home under the streetlights.

Another year another almanac, a washed-out castle in the sand.

Divorced. Wife living with someone else. Pregnant with his child.

Some longings appear so frequently they must be instinct.

We were alone in the world, and we had left dear ties behind us.

Under pillows of snow, the creek shushes the sharp architecture of ice.