The Proper Fingering is Essential When Attempting the Works of Johann Sebastian Bach VIBRATIONS are odd things. Alone in her room at fifteen, Charlotte played for herself. She played because no one was home and she could take the towel from over the strings and just...

Shelby pressed “send,” then closed her eyes and prayed. She looked in the mirror again. The big mirror on the wall across from her bed was one of her few real luxuries, wide and tall and taking up most of the wall of her small bedroom. She liked sitting in the middle...

The thing was, she was very young. Certainly legal, but still, I really should have been ashamed of myself. I was a thirty-year-old man, and she was eighteen. It started out so simply, though. She sent me a picture because I wrote something silly, like, “if a picture...

We bought her on Bond Street. There was a little shop, above a haberdashery, with a large plate glass window with gold foil lettering on it, where they have a book full of people who want to be sold. The counter person was quite dashing in their three piece suit. They...

Have you ever seen a ghost? I have. It changed my life. I got to New York in September, which, honestly, is the best time to be in New York. The leaves were changing. The air was crisp. I was twenty-five and had just gotten my first real job and little apartment up in...

Downstairs, in a bar that’s a half secret, there is a party that is supposed to be kept quiet. It was my first time at that particular soiree and I was told when the door closed things get interesting. The painter is a chemical necessity in these situations. She is a...

We did not speak. It was something we decided early on, in emails and texts and our conversations at the café that sat right in between our apartment buildings. One by one, we took away each of these lines of communication. As our negotiations went on and the...

The Verecund An Order of Dionysus Story By Jack Stratton Thinking back, it struck Rebecca as silly that she once worshipped the Barnes & Noble in her little hometown in Connecticut. How it seemed a sanctuary from the mall and all the over-branded family dining...

The key was not letting on how he felt. Let the rope take over. Let the familiar routine play out like a dance number he had memorized. 

That would keep him from letting on the he had a crush on her. That would hide the fact that he had been pining for her for weeks....

The thing about Frankie was she rolled her eyes every time I added something to a conversation. She never laughed at my jokes, and she never looked me in the eye. I thought it was because I was a little too obvious about my attraction to her. She was brilliant,...