‘Compassion was the most important, perhaps the sole law of human existence. ~ ‘The Idiot’ by Fyodor...

During those first awful weeks in March, when rumors swirled that the city was about to go into lockdown and the wealthy clogged bridges...

I almost jumped when I saw the thing but had enough decency not to. It was small and whimpering, and for a second, I thought it was a...

On a sunny, bright blue June morning—likely the last day of his nine-month-long teaching career—Randy Shep slouched on a hot metal...

She worships at his feet. She doesn’t care that I exist. She stands at the foot of the stage, looking up at him with adoring eyes, his...

What Do You Do with a Two-Hundred Pound Jesus? They’d had one too many that night, again. Sometime after midnight, Petey and Earl found...

Look and see. He knew where. He took the stoned path, now more grass or correctly just plain but lovely weed, to the wooden structure,...

In April, he rang my doorbell, and by June, he had disappeared. But I didn’t know that then, as I sat in my apartment during a worthless...

“Will someone come for me?” I ask out loud. The only one to hear is a Blackbird I’ve named Stanley Stub. Stanley has one good leg, the...

The audience, crammed shoulder to shoulder in tight, neat, curved rows, stared upwards, mouths agape like stunned goldfish, semi-chewed...

The Bible Class our parents forced us to attend every Sunday morning was so mind-numbingly boring that Trinity and I spent our time there...

When I wake, the baby is gone. My hand rests on my flattened, soft belly, empty except for some gas. Maybe it’s left over from the dream...

It was almost a joke when you asked me. I’d been splashing water on my face in the bathroom off the grand ballroom’s hallway, inching up...

Elaine knew that her keys were trying to tell her something when she dropped them on the floor in front of her bed. They landed in such a...

The metal door slams behind me, shutting out the last bit of the day’s light, leaving the fluorescent bulb to its dreary work. My shoes...

A freshly cut rose stood between the smiling couple, droplets of water clinging to its rigid stem. They reached across the corner table...

They stand below the rim in a group and reach their fingertips to bump the ball toward the rim or away from it, toward another rim....

I was told that I could no longer come into the office, but I still had to work. So my apartment became my office. And because the two...

Deep into the summer in year two of the pandemic, New York City’s piquant vibe of menace had curdled into a dank atmosphere of dread. ...

Cosimo was looking distractingly handsome. We were celebrating his 75th birthday that day, at the Party Palazzo, and I know he likes that...