Photo by Dan Keck Almost once a week, I head to my local post office branch to ship issues of Story to readers like you. It’s on the same lot as a grocery store, Lucky’s, so I often bop over there to get a sandwich, or olive oil, or coffee, or whatever other single items …
When my high school geometry teacher, Mr. Elliot, called me on the phone and asked if I had an excuse for being tardy today, I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d graduated twenty-nine years ago. He had been a good teacher, stern but fair, whereas I’d been a lousy student, terrible at math, …
The night before everything happened, I was cooking an omelet when Finnegan clomped up the steps to our humble railroad apartment. We were on the top floor, our neighbors ghosts who worked night shifts, so I knew it had to be Finn—even before the fireproof door swung open, sharp knob smacking the wall and enlarging …
That summer day, when I still lived with Mamma and Vern, I woke up early in the morning to go for a walk around the neighborhood. It was 2007, I was eighteen then, and headed off to college in a few weeks. I planned to study Zoology back then. It made sense that I liked …
The date’s strange to begin with—not a date-date, more of a get-together, though less get-together than an obligation or an attempt to prove something undefined. In short, Kasey has been invited by her old college friend Ari to a hockey game, accompanied by Ari’s teenage son, Ben. Kasey gets the seat that Ari’s ex-fiancé should …
On my way to a first date, I found an unlabeled VHS sitting on a sidewalk. I stopped, straightened my skirt, and tried to remember how long it had been since I’d seen one, that bulky cartridge that meant Disney or cheap cartoons when I was a child. I didn’t mean to pick it up …
The neighbor was at it again. At 4:00 a.m. he switched on his living room light. According to my mother, even from across the street that light cast an intrusive yellow glow into her bedroom. Only the full moon on a clear night, angled above her like the lamp over a dentist’s chair, would have …
Bode thought his house was decent. It was a slight, unpainted bungalow with walls that became damp and soft when it rained. And his compound, gated and unpaved, behaved like a stopped-up sink in the way it retained water. Blue tailed lizards scuttled in long limbed bursts across his premises, dark winged birds flew over …
Millat concentrated on the bronze angel atop the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park as Stav walked alongside him in silence. Millat was still a Southern boy at heart, even at 60. Polite, deferential and youthful, he was commonly mistaken for a man in his forties. Raised in Huntington, West Virginia by a Syrian father and an …
Ben inspected the tripod’s mended telescopic leg, making sure it was secure. He reassembled his gear and himself after having been found, more sodden than sober, on a tote road outside the logging camp. This was due to some late day mishap he didn’t quite remember when the road turned to a corduroy of logs …