The words no longer carried any meaning:
“I am sorry for your loss.”
So rehearsed and animatronic-
Like the pitch of a very bored salesman …

The summer I met Clayton Wingate I’d been cleaning houses in Savannah for two years, enough time to see all kinds of people. Clayton was fresh out of law school up at Emory, and renting the third floor of the Pearsons’ house over on Gaston Street, a block or two west of Forsyth Park. All the houses on that block look pretty much like the others …

by Jacob Lambert

As the train came to a shuddering halt, Thomas Little stepped down the steel steps and out into the dry summer air. In the distance, he could see an immense pond, one surround by a forest that seemed to threaten the very integrity of the above crystalline sky. The humidity, along with the multitudes of insects swarming around his sweaty, waxen face, …

My name — is Paris Hilton, and I am a man, which does me no favors in a Southern town. I am not heir to any dynasty, I have never made a sex video that was viewed by anyone of importance, and I am not a goddamned socialite. My parents merely had an unnatural obsession with Homer …

by Elizabeth Burk

“Where are the mountains?”
I ask, after an hour’s drive
through flat-filled landscapes
of sugar cane and rice fields, miles …