Everyone knows that a raindrop is shaped like a teardrop, right? Well, not so fast. While a teardrop is used to depict a raindrop in most instances, an actual raindrop is round when small. Raindrops ...

“I wanted to put it all behind me,” the narrator of Small Rain freely concedes. “I wanted to be on the other side again of that gulf that separates the sick from the well—or what seems like a gulf, I ...

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. On a muggy July afternoon in Iowa City, I went grocery shopping with the ...

The unnamed narrator of Small Rain enters the dire space of an American hospital where he will spend weeks in recovery. So many tubes and wires; so much waiting. But there is also a strange gift in ...

As Emily Dickinson once wrote, pain places the sufferer in an “infinite” present tense: “It has no future but itself.” In “Pain Has an Element of Blank,” Dickinson pinpoints the absence of words, ...