My mother dragged me into an antique shop at age 8 with the usual "touch nothing" admonishment.

I of course ignored this within seconds of her being distracted and a fine china set was soon crashing to the floor.

My vain attempts to stop the tray in its evil surrender to gravity did succeed in creating the miracle of nothing being broken.

The elder gentleman running the shop merely smiled as mom fumed and said he had a challenge just for boys like me ,to break the oak…

Farha Ahmed's mother is standing at my door wearing a floral print shirt and khaki capri pants, a small older woman who could be anybody's mother because she has that warm trustworthy essence, a nurturing mommy charisma.  She tells me that we need another woman on Sugar Land's city council, that Farha's male competitor, Harish Jajoo, is calling her daughter a terrorist in letters sent only to caucasion residents.   She shows me a copy of the letter and says, "My daughter…

I've got a friend. We've never met face-to-face, it's a cyberspace thing, but I know two things about him already. One, he's a smart, funny guy with some heart. Two, he's crazy like me.

One of these days we'll hook up and get drunk, and go out and howl at the moon.

It's one of the reasons friendship exists, so long as we don't try to sing...

               I was wearing my black, collared, slick, long sleeve shirt that I had just bought from the Gap to show it off on that particular Friday night.  It made my beer gut look like it was gone (you know how black makes everyone look thin), and it gave me this mysterious panther-like look while all the silver rings I was wearing on my lanky fingers embellished the blackness of it. I’m going to have to say that it’s one of my favorite shirts, and I had to wear it on that night in order…

Just before I die, may I hear meadowlark music as a woodpecker drums and a goldfinch twitters in flight. May hummingbirds buzz beneath a kingfisher’s machine-gun call. May warblers cheep, nuthatches whee and swallows swoop and sing. Allow flickers to wacka-wacka, crows to raucously caw, grackles to raise hackles, and scrub jays to talk squawk. And may I hear this tune:

the flapping-wings whoosh of herons and sandhill cranes against the yodel of a loon. Then, drifting from open windows…

His left hand hooks like a lobster claw, the weathered baseball mitt all crusty and snapping. On his right, he wears his brother’s beat-up hockey glove, just as ugly and cumbersome. He’s cut a foot off the end of his stick for an easier shot. Behind him leans a makeshift net of discarded hockey sticks, laced and lanced in the snow to serve as goal posts. He fires the rubber ball off a wall some twenty feet away, then…

Like electrons darting about an atom’s nucleus, the flies are already circling about the victim’s dead body---a noisy hum against the murder scene’s otherwise grim silence.  I hate this part of the job, but I steel myself as I reach into the deceased's suit-coat pocket and remove a silver cell phone. Perusing the phone’s call history, I immediately dial the last number that the dead man had, only an hour earlier, dialed.  A number accompanied solely by the name “Honey.”  Three rings, and a…

"One time not too long before sunrise, I'm tipping down this alley and I ain't broke luck and I'm hungry. Saturday morning and it's like a Tuesday or something and no one's around, and the only folks I've run into are all in this club full of speedfreaks, and drinking their blood makes me fart worse than beer and it tastes like hyenas with dropsy or something.

"So anyway, now, I'm in this alley, it's four in the morning, and up in this doorway I see this wino, ancient black…

"Look, man," the vampire told me, "that folklore is bunk, you know, with that shit that we've gotta kill daily to keep our cheeks pink, like we're some kind of junkies or something. I mean, c'mon; there's seven of us in this town that I know of, and that's seven times three-sixty-five, you know, body-countwise, which means give us a year, there's 2,555 corpses lying around in the alleys and shit, and--think of the headlines, you know?

"I sip and tip like a civilized person. You know,…

The only thing I knew how to do was make brake calipers for Pontiacs, and of course they would fit other cars but the General didn't see it that way and when they shut the plant down they basically shut us down, didn't they baby? So instead of soup we ate promises and instead of milk we drank dreams and we told each other that those low sounds in the night were the gatherings of our greatness, the stirrings of a dawn resplendent.

I remember your face when you came to me,…

Manal al-Sherif was freed today after spending 10 days in prison in Saudi Arabia. Her crime: driving a car.

The oil-rich nation, ruled by religious clerics (although the Saudi royal family are the nominal rulers) practices an austere brand of Islam known as…

Sandra, head under the hot jets of the shower, never ears the toilet flush. The blast of frigid water takes her completely by surprise. She lets out a vengeful “HAAaaarrRRGGgggg” before hurriedly stepping out of the tub enclosure. Not bothering to cover herself, she snags her cold wet clothes from the floor and rushes through the door toward the bedroom where she can see Lucy, half sitting half lying on her bed, shaking from a…

Sandra never sees the door being pulled open and the massive frame of Brenda coming through. She swings her captured pillow way back, hitting Brenda square on the head, just a fraction of a second before the projectile from Lucy comes crashing on the exact same spot. The double impact sends Brenda backward, out of balance, as the door comes closing hard on the back of her skull. The girls hear a wet thump as the limp body of the…

I remember when I visited his flat many years ago and his inebriated dad would say, “Donny, go to the store and buy a loaf of milk and a quart of bread,” and before departing, his dad would add, “And don’t forget the cigarettes and beer.”

Well, I would snicker, yet Donny knew what not to do. He wouldn’t laugh, nor make a correction, or even apologize for his wayward dad; he would just accomplish the task. You see, he lived like that all his…

The werewolf came at her as she left the drugstore, but just as he got there, she yelled, "Weaughh, motherfucker, your breath!"

He screeched to a halt and made like to cover his mouth, then blinked and got pissed. "Hey, lady, you try going in Walgreen's looking like me to pick up some toothpaste sometime, and then see if your breath don't keep killing the flies on the way out the door just like mine!"

Then he leaned in, took a sniff, and…

Yesterday at the Hay Festival I went to the launch of a brand new way of publishing, in which readers and writers work together directly. I was sceptical beforehand but it sounds really excellent. One of the authors in the first tranche is Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, who read a great story called The Nice Bomb. The project's called Unbound, and the link's below, so if you want to loosen the stranglehold of the big publishers who have their authors over a barrel, do take a look.  If it…