Magnificent Octopus

I was tipsy, yes, but also I was grace itself. There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic c...

On the platform of a train station, late morning, early June: two women embracing after a separation of several months. Behind them, a tall ...

Who even gets married? said Bobbi. It's sinister. Who wants state apparatuses sustaining their relationship? I don't know. What is o...

We always realize things afterwards. Loneliness, for example. It's not when we think we're alone, or when we feel abandoned. That...

In person, they baffled me even more. People without hope require direction , according to Dyson. But this wasn't what hopelessness look...

Anyone who takes gentle care of a cow is someone I trust. It's a more telling characteristic of a person than taking Communion. Certainl...

"Why is this your life? Why are you not a truck driver in Norway? Why?" I have recovered from the sickness. I continue to feel tir...

Though provincial by birth, we all considered ourselves the most cultured teenagers in our town, the ones refined enough to be embarrassed b...

"Sad sells." This might sound sadistic but it's true; people want to see their sadness reflected back at them because it makes...

One day, the past calls you up on the phone and you drop everything and go to Bosnia, because your childhood friend's brother who's ...

There's a Jewish joke that says God often rereads the Torah to try to understand what's going on in this world he created. On the 56...

If faced with a rock, for instance, one should stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. Then the observer should keep lo...

The pills flatten me, make me into a thin scum on the surface of still water. I don't sink. Coast instead, detached from the world aroun...

Άδάμας (Unconquerable), by Sophia Wallace, 2013. Desire, for women, can be complicated. While men are generally allowed to want openly, to c...

I'm humming a little. Softly. Just to myself. A tune I heard somewhere, can't remember where from, but it's lovely. It comes eas...

Above us Tyll Ulenspiegel turned, slowly and carelessly — not like someone in danger but like someone looking around with curiosity. He stoo...

It is a fact, though, that for some time now I have known about life. As for love, on that score there is not only no illusion left in me, b...

"I will submit to you today that logic is indeed sexy. Logic is fact in a world of fiction, truth in a society of lies, and light in th...

I indulged in the luxury of wandering through a bookstore the other day, hoping, as I do, that some miraculous book would stop me in my trac...

The last day of summer is misty and smells like fermented blackberry juice, and it sticks to me and makes me gag. I sit in my room in the at...