I keep waiting for them to say / something the least bit unfamiliar.

One time I was sitting near a row of bushes along the side of the house playing with some toys. Immersed in what I was doing. And a thick river of shit flowed from my asshole.

How was I supposed to know / what to do about every pimply boy wanting to stick his / dick in my mouth?

Age 10: Wrote an essay for school about how I wanted to be a rapper when I grew up. When I got home and told my dad about it he said "Rap for me" then lay in my bed while I rapped "Lose Yourself" by Eminem for him. When I finished he told me I needed to "get into it more, not just stand there with [my] hands in my pockets."

2006 saw the release of World Trade Center and United 93, the first two studio films to use the events of 9/11 as their primary focus. I recall their impending releases at my local movie theatre

By living according to core values, we can carry on daily tasks with conviction. Conserve fossil fuels. Avoid the plastic cycle. Too much looking around can lead to paralysis due to the inevitable sense of unfathomable vastness that makes consciousness feel like an infinitesimal quirk.

Ed's note: This story originally ran on Hobart in 2010. In celebration of the upcoming publication of Andrew Brininstool's book, Crude Sketches Done in Quick Succession, in which this story

Four decades after breaking off our high school romance, we found each other again, I, Phillip, twenty-five years into my second marriage, and I, Lily, divorced.

“For years after the war and after the camps, Chava Rosenfarb woke up every morning at 4:00 a.m. to write. She’d open her eyes in the darkness and slip out of bed without waking her husband...

And then I found her on a VHS. My double, my twin, my doppelganger. Laura Palmer.

Toby was blind. He was different. We left him alone.

I tried to balance things with prescriptions; I tried some more.

The fact that it happened at the town's polar bear research station is irrelevant. A polar bear didn't kill the child.

Sunday paper. Card Showers announced for Cecile Jarry, 99, and Fred Aldrich, 90. Meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Club this Wednesday.

The parents were not without greed, and so the younger painted, and as she painted the painting changed. 

“An extremely rare Pokémon that may evolve in a number of different ways depending on stimuli.” – Pokémon FireRed

What we liked to do that fall—once mornings had grown thin around the edges, the sun sheer like white linen and gone by four o’clock—was to put on eyeliner and these old fur stoles she had collected from thrift store heaps...

On the night I left your apartment, my phone died.

Against what, exactly, is Karl Ove Knausgaard struggling? 

I’m a symbol of an America newly forged and I live with like 1000 other turkeys in a yard Who gives a shit

from what my hair says about you

announcers on television will say things like “he was just too late” during a soccer match when a player fails to follow up on a set towards a goal. it adds a

Is Chekov why I’m so sad? I’ll give you twenty bucks for a plot in literature that acknowledges his talent, but ignores him slightly more.

“I’m helping you get in touch with your heritage,” Susana said to Tom, foisting the grocery bag onto the counter.  She pulled the tub of sour cream out, along with a ziploc bag of cheddar cheese

you are a holiday routine

i dreamt shirt collars and close hands
i woke up in the bark of a dog
i soaked in a bath of fog and breath
i scrubbed myself with roasted marshmallow
i dressed

Opus 53

Place the palms of your hands side by side on this wine glass. After a short time, raise your hands and place your eyes at the same level as your palms.

Notice the possible and

I’m in Tom's apartment staring at the big deer head he has hanging on the wall of his living room. Tom has a small place and the deer head looks enormous. Some kind of giant, mutant deer, like it's