We are grommets along the edge of an old drawstring tucker.

You on one far edge and I, the other.

At first, though, we were close, were we not?

Life gathered fold upon fold and we together held in all the murky contents,

the feelings, the memories, the f…

Is there someone who can teach me

How to make and keep a friend?

For it feels as though my every start

Too quickly meets its end.

My head tells me it’s all my fault:

All my ways just seem so strange.

I’m too quick to love kind people;

My age falls outsid…

It is indeed a special, ineffable moment when a movie director falls hopelessly in love, but when I found her, my own scene clicked into place and its unearthly beauty seized me. Such is the power that an extra can play in just that kind of crowd scene. A…

To me, she wasn't just from this place, she was the place. I met her gaze when we stood face to face, her peering up at my ball cap and sunglasses, squinting in the sun, and she smiled. Her various teeth shone in the shadow of my body, and I knew that w…

And then I saw her, the face I'd been hoping to find ever since arriving in the country. I had arrived at the airport and, walking down those stairs, I caught a scent in the air, and I knew she would be here, somewhere, probably in a crowd of people. The …

Rebecca, distressed, started ripping up the seams she had just completed, her mouth pursed and disapproving. "No, that'll never do," she fussed. "The edges aren't matching up and it just looks so sloppy. I'll just have to redo that whole stretch. Hand me …

One dazzling evening, Mr. Dover Beach was lunching with me and tossing his curls. One of the curls fell down to the ground and Lee Flit swiftly stooped down and rescued it from a passing crayfish, which frazzledly crayed away for easier prey.

Oliver Sutt…

What Lord Shillingsly didn't realize was the magnitude of the gift he was to give to her in exchange for her silence. Arnold was a sure thing; no doubt of that. But when Lady Enid showed her the photorealistic scans of his date with the flower girl as an …

Twenty minutes later, Snifty leaned back against his bar and wiped his brow against the bar rag. The Turvey had never had so many patrons as there were here today. None of them knew anyone else, but they were all here for the same thing: The Tweaking. In …

Kendreth Leary, manager of the targeted bank, had never trusted Tory or Constantine, even when they were a newly shacked up couple of fifteen months old. Something always seemed odd about the two of them. Maybe it was the flinty scruff on Con's chin, or t…

Stella trundled along the brook's edge, gazing behind her all the while when she could. The moon, the MOON! It was always there behind her, even when the brook changed directions like an eager puppy on its first trip to the park after a water-drinking con…

Loping along the highway in a bustle of activity and a Winebagel Scampmaster, Ossiary Lefthook sprang bodily towards the Arkansas border, more or less staying upon the tarmacked line of road that went by the name of Interstate 83.2, or "The Tagliatelle Ba…

The day of the Cow Rite had arrived, like a lover who had blacked out overnight and had finally come home from the pub. As the day dawned, a mauve haze like a spill of off-coloured milk on the dairy floor of the horizon, the fields blossomed with daffodil…

The King sent out a messenger into the Wide World to seek out information. The messenger did not return. So he sent out more than four hundred servants to seek the messenger out. The King then assembled these servants to inquire as to their progress.

KING…

How sullen is eternity! It sits sulky through the years,

Softly murmuring of boredom to a crowd of heedless ears.

Satisfaction needs a structure. Stories must begin and end.

In between, we need a climax, where we lose or gain a friend.

Life is not some mi…