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“Make it look like you’re working on a nearby shelf,” Aunt Mary whispered.

We have mysterious inclinations. No one can explain it to us.

Expulsion. He was out, his course set. One word can turn the key.

A six-word story written by eighth-grader Marlon Jiminez.

Barbra Nightingale

In high school I walked around with a beat-up copy of Kafka’s stories.

She was the idiot who fell in love with some high-class gigolo.

The band was amateur at best. It didn’t matter. People loved them.

Whales are very big (I saw one on a beach once) but trash is way bigger.

The clearest memory was when his father shot a grizzly.

In school, he was called gook, chink, and one boy called him ching-chong.

Teddy, the new sous chef, is on fire again. It’s the second time in a week. I make a silent promise to myself never to have sex on a beach, not even with Ryan Gosling.

I think you’re carrying on to get your brothers in trouble.

A Midwestern man is never without his knife. Half of us carry guns.

Bill Evans’s quiet solo was walking out on unbelievably thin ice.

He grabbed me, groped for my hips, kissing me, smelling my hair.

Son, do you know of shame? Then you must know that I cannot feel it.

Maybe this was one thing in his life he had done right, or so he hoped.

You remind me of lizards birthed in an outhouse by an ogre or a loon.

“It means,” Stoner said again, and could not finish what he had begun.

“Mind you come straight home,” Mrs. Heywood always says.

Truth, it seems, spills from movies and sitcoms in the wires’ wake.

Cassandra blared Puccini and Eminem so she would not pray.

For the first two months of class, Toby did barely any writing at all.

The first time we were alone, I knew it before he even told me.

If it were me, kid, I’d swallow. You bet I would. But first I’d run like hell.

In Ovid’s tale, the virgin Philomela was raped by her brother-in-law.

I’m trying to manage my dumb-dumb time machine brain and be here.

My father was at an awful disadvantage in a sport where cunning is a virtue.