Smoke rose from the barrel of the gun like a serpent crawling up from its wicker basket

And don’t drop food.

Let’s press ahead a little further by sketching out a few variations among short shorts:ONE THRUST OF INCIDENT. (Examples: Paz, Mishima, Shalamov, Babel, W. C. Williams.) In these short shorts the time span is extremely...

Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.

If a nuclear disaster occurred, and you had to live out those final painful days just stretched out somewhere thinking about your life–This is who I am. This is what I love. This is what...

Apapun teorinya, hari sial itu memang ada. Bila mungkin, ingin rasanya menghapus hari tersebut atau memulai segala sesuatu dari awal. Bagaimana bila kita memulai hari dengan cara yang berbeda, memikirkan dan melakukan hal-hal yang berbeda...

I need to master the art of talking to her before I can even contemplate anything else.

It’s unexpectedly painful to have become a pronoun.

Absently, Quinn reached for the sheet to replace it over the aged mirror, but the back of his hand brushed against the cold surface and a strange shiver ran up his arm and down his...

Baumauer secretly fears Kalist – and Kalist knows it.

I’ve been asking you to marry me since we met! What more do you want?

I hate this night. I hate that it makes me a person so truly removed from the real me; this man who sits in silence in his parlor – purposely quarantined from his family –...

Do you want to risk it?

The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was...

Sarucha (age 8): “Look, down there, I recognize it, ciudad de Jerusalén (the city of Jerusalem)! Jerusalén!, Jerusalén!” she exclaimed.

I had always been an atheist until I met Lenny. He was too wonderously complex and good for there to be no benevolent and intelligent force behind our marvelous cosmos. Lenny gave me the actual...

He’s in a side room alone with her and it’s far too fucking hot.

An overnight bag with the company logo – a white silhouette of a finch (which once perched on the curved back of a stallion representing cofounder, Orwell, but has now been ‘adjusted’) – sits motionless...

It takes both sides to build a bridge.

Yes, sir.” I reply instantly. My voice sounds needy – already.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a...

Short fiction seems more targeted – hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it’s a lot smokier...

Lending my voice to a dedicated readership is a match made in heaven.

Humans are aware of very little, it seems to me, the artificial brainy side of life, the worries and bills and the mechanisms of jobs, the doltish psychologies we’ve placed over our lives like a...

Baumauer has been lured into the exhausting habit of supplying Kalist with ever more exceptional quality work just to appease him and often survives all day and all evening without food, but Maxwell D. Kalist...

The usual short story cannot have a complex plot, but it often has a simple one resembling a chain with two or three links. The short short, however, doesn’t as a rule have even that...

The American girl isn’t ANY girl; she’s a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.

Between the sands of time and tradition is a multitude of truths untold.

The farmhouse sat on a rise at the end of a long dirt road, in a clearing surrounded by fruit trees and ninety acres of pines. It was painted white, and peeling, and some former...

Ariana strikes me as the type of girl who is attracted to authenticity.

And next time? Eat the stupid cupcake.

The frame of the mirror was a deep mahogany and carved with an intricate design of what appeared in the dim light to be leaves and vines. The mirror’s surface was clouded with dust and...

Don’t suffocate in there.

I imagine I should have told it to you before? I love you, Sejal.I wish for you to become my wife.Recently I’ve also opened a shop in North Dakota and thinking that, just maybe, you...

I’m an old man, now. I’ve been alone since my 17th birthday. I’d wanted to marry, have a bunch of kids, and maybe be a grandpa. The big family around the Thanksgiving table, laughing and...

She knew there were only small joys in life–the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through–and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today’s literary world; there’s precious little economic incentive to write one…

In the beginning we start with roses. The king’s flower right? Only they wilt in less than a day, especially when exposed to the elements. But Carnations? Oh, what a beautiful flower. They come in...

Oh no. I’m not gonna let you leave yet. I’m gonna show you the value of takin’ your time to get to work. I probably should have done this a long time ago.

You are a more powerful person than you might have ever imagined.” Maxwell D. Kalist.

I’d never make that a personal promise, but I will get you to a phone.

It is a happiness to wonder; — it is a happiness to dream.

I am your slut, Master – only yours.”Your eyes burn into mine and you too pause to relish your utter possession of me.

Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.

Let’s start over shall we? Hello gorgeous. I’m Justin McKinley. I’m head baker at Le Chef Petite. I’d love to get to know you better. Can I seduce you with my vast knowledge of sweet...

Why ruin my sister’s birthday simply because the entire planet was going to hell in a hand basket?

Mama has such cleverly timed headaches I wonder if she has any at all.

Men circle like bees around honey, buzzing to communicate their sexual despair.

There can’t be much development of action or theme in such stories, but at least there is some. By contrast, in the short short the very idea of character seems to lose its significance, seems...

What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.