Most discussed stories

Tough Guy

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He remembers his father’s concrete slab hands. Balled into fists they resembled kettlebells.

1939, What I wanted

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...when suddenly I was pushed from behind, smack into the deep end.

The Polymath

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Now that I am dead, my god will fight your god...

Independent Assiduity, part one

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This is me pitching a recently completed screenplay to a film producer at lunch the other day:

140 Words on Solitude and Being Alone

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As a child I drowned myself in the pages of books, and as a writer I prefer to be left alone with my imagination.

If Dogs Should Come

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do not run

Fictionaut or Not? Write On.

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Okay, I'm here; I'm participating. Enjoying the back & forth with other writers. Waiting for penises and fetuses to move down the "Most Recent" list, but working around them. Well, that's kind of unintentionally visual.This essay, like many other reads on here, is…

Windfall

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It turned out Eel’s brain corrects for imbalance, and he can only feel danger for a moment or two.

Real As Your Underwear

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when unicorns took to flight / the poles shifted / the world flooded / and Pangaea busted open like calloused palm

Night Talk

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She said, "Tonight let's talk of things untrue and he said, ' Like black is white and night is day and up is down and in is out?' and she said, 'Yeah, those things we know to be false for sure like you know, like...well, you could say, 'I really love you' and I could say,…

The Fact of the Matter

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Jeanne and I were married for eight years. I never knew her.

The Sweetness of Youth

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On my twenty-second birthday, in the spring of 1979, I had a crawfish boil, my first. Ninety pounds of red mudbugs on a picnic table spread with newspaper, my birthday cake sitting at the end of the table like an afterthought.I hadn't…

Interlude in Trader Joe's Parking Lot

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I'm pulled in by the music like a rogue wave and he has no idea I'm drowning...

Nepenthe

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Alas, the wind, the rain/ and plate tectonics take temples,/ fire and sediment papyrus and clay,

Non-Renewable

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we wipe the blood of our progress from our hands.

Eggman

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The last one I tipped over the edge was just like all the others: fragile, pale, humming to himself as he sat on the ledge overlooking the gardens.

The Straps and the Electric

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The winter sun was going down and she watched it out the window.Light like shards of glass,time had melted.It took hold.She was held down by brown leather straps and she couldremember the smell of incense and little hands and little eyesof an infant cold on the bed.She…

WAR STORY

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We shot out the windows of an abandoned building nearby so as to trick them into thinking we’d had snipers stationed in that building. They shot at the abandoned building.

Leave Off Doves

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Midway through the fall semester, an unremarkable girl in Professor Woody's Advanced Fiction workshop dyed her hair an unnatural shade of dark, changed her name to Tasmina, and turned in a story filled with made-up words.

The Depth of the Dust

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Can anyone remember what the Great American dream was?

Birds Fly

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Birds fly and people hurry in the wind and rain like it's a matter of pity.

Stretching to Understand

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You looked like someone I didn't want to know. I guess that's why I got in the car that night. My penchant for self-destruction was aroused by your black nail polish and the lavender circles under your eyes. You looked like someone that could hurt me, yeah, that's why I got…

The Green Bench

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Listen to him barking in the night. Fear shifts on the bed next to you, hogging the covers. Stare at the ceiling and wonder what to do. Forget his birthday. Forget he is forty-two. Forget the phone call from Berkeley twenty-one years…

Granny Medicine

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Antibiotic ointment didn't help. Maybe Granny medicine would.

Glory at the Motel 6

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Rory and Betty Sloan entered the first of 40 rooms in the new Motel 6 to place Holy Bibles in 40 night tables.

Futurist

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What will become/ of the resource-sucking poor

Payout

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In the evidence of broad daylight, in the secrecy of darkness, in drizzling rain that teased the embers, Annabelle worked hard.

Coffee

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I hate walking into restaurants and cafes by myself to meet someone. I always feel awkward, as if no one will claim me. I'm hanging on the threshold now for an agonizing few moments scanning the room until I see my friend.“Hi!” she says, waving her cup at…

T.S. Eliot On His Deathbed

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I guess at the end you’re only looking forward. Or upward actually, since you can only lie there on your back looking upward, straight ahead toward infinity, your mouth in a grimace, with the ghostly pink lips peeled back from the teeth.

The People Who Won't Get Back to Me

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Literary agents, also editors, But most assuredly not my creditors, Someday they won’t mean jack to me— The people who won’t get back to me.