Most discussed stories

Exchange Student

17961796 views00 comments00 favs

Sometimes he could feel so small he believed he could fit through the eye of a needle.

Fishers of Hope

18941894 views00 comments00 favs

June Day sprinted with urgency through the halls of the Armistice. Whenever she passed a window looking out into space, if it wasn't already covered, she didn't bother looking out, but not because of her hurry; no one did anymore. She was young, but the…

Our Last Tea Party

13841384 views00 comments00 favs

It’s the Tea, stupid. Drink up.

The Inkblot Test

22302230 views00 comments00 favs

“Regard this inkblot,” the Psych says to Worker 168. “What do you see?” Worker 168, a thin young women wearing overalls, peers at the inkblot. “I see a beautiful summer day,” she says. “A young woman, wearing a flowing dress, sits…

60 is the new 20

13831383 views00 comments22 favs

I once saw a TV commercial that showed a group of Anglo retirees laughing around a card table. The slogan 60 is the new 20 floated beneath their fat, fun-loving heads. My parents are bona fide Baby Boomers. Their lives are build on credit and catchy…

Eighth Wonder of Mississippi?

14431443 views00 comments00 favs

Lula’s fried chicken should be served on the hem of Jesus’s robe rather than out of a styrofoam box. It’s so good that I kept glancing at the little tray on the steam table, hoping to be hungry again, ready to yank pieces out of the grasp of strangers, to

Walking To Gibraltar, Chapter 3: In Which Everyone Was Wrong

17071707 views00 comments00 favs

What's the protocol for telling people your spouse has cancer? How do you tell your son, your friends, your co-workers? How do you tell your mother? How do you tell her mother?

otherwise, chaos!

10491049 views00 comments00 favs

The tongue touches the lip, looking inward, remembering. The head nodding yes. Staring directly at the memory like an animal, while the crowds pass by, and occasional phrases materialize out of the air. We live and love and create. Yes we do. Otherwise,

Sense and Sensibility Too

855855 views00 comments00 favs

http://fictionique.com/?p=15975

A Brief, Protracted Reflection

17211721 views00 comments00 favs

...Loves and fights and retires; / And dies.

Have You Ever

11051105 views00 comments00 favs

Have you ever Felt As if you were Alone In the world?

cheap idol of possession

10851085 views00 comments00 favs

And how the stars in your eyes exploited you. And the pollen-bearing moon shows its sex, and the years open their cards and splay them out on the table for all to see. And you come home from all the nipples of your Trojan Wars like Ulysses, and lie down

on the morning of my final

882882 views00 comments00 favs

And there was one girl from Ireland, with her thick Irish brogue, who came into my bedroom early on the morning before my final exam for my Masters degree in the writing program at Irvine. She knew I was so nervous about taking the exam that I hadn’t sl

11am, Sunday, in Green

14971497 views00 comments00 favs

The eyelid of the sink blinks silence. The clocks choke on smoke.

Knowing the Ending

10541054 views00 comments00 favs

“No!” Shouted Jon. “I don't get it!” Clarissa stared at her hands in her lap and tried not to cry. She knew it was her fault they were there. She was the one who cheated. But she could not understand why Jon wanted, no needed, to…

Five Million Yen: Chapter 33

13061306 views00 comments00 favs

This will take forever. I’ll never get to Antibes to meet Isabella, much less make it to Marseille to deliver the picture and then catch the overnight train to Paris. I may have to call Jean-Claude Lyon, the orchestra manager of the Monte Carlo orchestra,

The Last Appearance of God

10511051 views00 comments00 favs

Talking about the event years later, all of the observers agreed to a surprising extent on God's details. God was not an old man with a beard, nor a halo of light, nor a burning bush. God was an absence, a disruption of vision. When you looked right at Go

Getting There

11651165 views00 comments00 favs

Her light blue eyes fixed on a point to our left, past one of the church steeples poking out of the flat, charred ground – like a toothpick protecting a birthday cake from its cellophane ceiling; an untouched bethesda keeping the never-blue sky from crash

YOU ARE A FRIEND, SEWING TRAIN

34423442 views00 comments11 fav

over taking the sky before near blindness, a clipping occurs

Metro Blues.

12111211 views00 comments00 favs

She had no eyes that I could see. Just a pair of lips; they looked soft

5 Poems In The Shape Of Other Poems

13921392 views00 comments11 fav

the things we will accomplish, the things we will leave to others

Arcana Magi Zero + Pure - c.1

16161616 views00 comments00 favs

A Nocturne, whose grey mana seeped out of it mouth, grabbed the roof of the building with its large claws. Using it as leverage, it stood itself up, hunched over, its long whale like head roared like a loud horn.

Circularity (Act 1)

26842684 views00 comments00 favs

Ian Markham stood before the massive triangular window of Circularity's pyramidal office building. Its Technicolor hologram, a coup in advertising sloganeering, urgently flashed the company's ubiquitous tagline—IT'S NOT JUST AN ADVENTURE. IT'S A SECOND CHANCE! …

The Messenger, Chapter 2

23782378 views00 comments00 favs

"Something happened to me, Rasul, and I got these powers for a reason ... then I just happened to have a karaoke buddy who happens to have grown up in a family of magicians, who knew something about what I was going through?  That's *fate*!"

Castor and Pollux

16391639 views00 comments00 favs

Over the stained fence the spectres flew and that is where the rain was turning colder and colder in the time when the trees had become mostly bare.

The Fields

13661366 views00 comments00 favs

Swat at those screeching children with tufts of harp-grass. Flail, mad eyed and sad sighed with all gleaming hope gone out of the daylight. Swat and screech swat and screech. We continue until their thick bark-like hides are smooth and polished. We sand them with…

Here's a five (5) question 'POP QUIZ' about ME!

23612361 views00 comments00 favs

Which well-known Portland celebrity did I at-first-unwittingly accost at the Aug. 2007 Thermals show, hitting them up for $0.50 so I could get a slice of pizza ?

With Every Word

12791279 views00 comments00 favs

The bedroom was still as our conversation dissolved into a heavy silence broken only by the ticking of the clock on her night table and the occasional sob that hadn't yet been swallowed in her pillow. I stubbed out my cigarette and leaned forward in…

Hyperbolic Doubt - And Wherever After To Discover The Truth Behind That Some Timely And Malignant Demon Bad Luck

12791279 views00 comments00 favs

The toilet paper had been the least of the issue. It was just something else for her to yell about. See, what she was really upset about was the bank account. The bank account had been his, then theirs, and now it was his again.

Trapping for Poetesses

730730 views00 comments00 favs

So many traps for catching female poets have been invented that it is a rare editor who ever really sees one. H.L. Mencken