1828 8 5
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We were old. Wind came in with small threats and played games with drapes. A print of orchids and some other green affair that looked to me like kiwis. Sadie was arranging some items on a desk and I noticed there was a cricket on the window. I was thinking…
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182841
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4. If the property line is a symbol, what about the neighbor girl's window, the flickering candle in her room, her black cotton panties?
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182853
|
When farming started in September, I thought of gambling, of my childhood best friend’s marriage ruined due to gambling, and of farming as a trope for living in the Midwest.
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182833
|
Other things are on my mind when the Tupperware lady says, "First, let's move your couch over by the door and the table here."
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18272316
|
They will take you, naked,
and put their tongues and fingers
into intimate, erogenous openings
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18272916
|
"...they ran shirtless like pagans under southern stars."
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18272719
|
On the bus I sat like an ounce.
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1827139
|
Dear Fictionaut Family,Some of you may recognize my name and remember reading my work, some of you may have joined more recently and be wondering what the hell I'm doing addressing you directly. I began writing on Fictionaut in 2010, during four years as I was fragmenting…
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1827101
|
I wonder, God. Do you sit around and play with the universe like it was your Wii? Or your Farmville? Or maybe your little iphone app? I mean, really. Did it ever occur to you that the little men, women and children on your screen actually bleed? Do you think…
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182773
|
Oh I'm melting all right, into a foul vapor rising from a dead volcano, not even able to spit fire, but only cold old frozen rock like dribbles of putrid plasma.
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182765
|
Someday, the Grim Reaper, wrapped in hooded cowl, the thorny stem of a red rose clenched between his teeth, will climb up the garden trellis to my bedroom window
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1826129
|
Some time ago, I began to write you letters with the idea of helping your newspaper become a more complete map of our little shared world.
|
182697
|
A man lives with a woman he loves enough to live with, but not enough to marry and not enough for kids. He knows he could love others enough to marry, enough for kids, but he's not the kind of man to find those women when he's with this woman.Sometimes “love”…
|
182687
|
I'd been working for two years as a barista in a Starbuck's in a giant, two-story Borders in an upscale mall on Rt. 355, a main artery between Washington D.C., and Frederick, Maryland. I'd finished my M.F.A in 2000 and was trying to build up steam for more grad…
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182652
|
Jimmy wore a tie to top that torn green tee he toted every day, every other. He smelled of dirt, said he had a feeling we had watermelon somewhere since he caught a whiff from his room inside his house across the street.
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182621
|
The trail wound through oak trees and climbed up a hill. The sun was high and hot whenever we came out from the cover of the trees.
We stopped under a tree.
“OK old man,” Leda said. She came to me and kissed me. Then she was unbuttoning my pants and kne
|
182633
|
IN BOX 12 OF DD FORM 214, the Department of Defense requires a narrative reason for every military discharge. Mine reads: Continued involvement of a discreditable nature with civilian and military authorities.
|
18261917
|
A flash in seven chapters.
|
182686
|
"Love, against the dying of the light." (An unusual story about George Whitman, former owner of the revered & beloved Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, France.)
|
1825168
|
This latest married man who lives at a great distance has leeched her energy in that very particular way such men do. Next to him, I am as interesting as long division.
|
1825910
|
I knew I needed to visit a beach / made entirely of sharks’ teeth
|
18252517
|
The scent of fresh cut grass./
The idiot sense of accomplishment/
mowing the lawn can bring.
|
18251510
|
There was gonna be a rumble in our schoolyard. An outright brawl. It was gonna be just like Blackboard Jungle. Only real. Not some movie at the Duwamish Drive-In. Every boy in my school, it seemed like, was lined up outside except me. All the third and fourth graders…
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1825169
|
She was as distant as Mao, someone I never met, but whom everyone carried in their eyes,
|
182500
|
I laid in the road, broken and alone, until I had no choice but to pull myself together and get out.
|
182563
|
Seph loved to scare her mother in the garden by picking up a worm with the tines of her gardening fork and chasing her with it, the dirty-pink body twisting on the end. Dee would scream a little, always eyes on the worm, and run slowly, as if…
|
1825104
|
They live a simple life..two solitudes by lamplight.
|
1825128
|
On the usefulness of hands.
|
182421
|
The Bike Messenger on Lexington Avenue
Comes to rest
taking a moment
in the falling rain
slowly massaging the
veins at the top
of his bald head
Cracking his neck
while the yellow cabs start
honking behind him
Unwilling to mov
|
182483
|
“Who says?” she purred in reply
“They all do” he countered smiling , chewing on an ice cube
“All of them, huh?”
She leaned forward, raising a wicked left eyebrow and whispered,
“And just who are they, anyway?”
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