Most read stories

An Open Letter to my Fictionaut Family

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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…

We Threw These At Each Other

18201820 views55 comments22 favs

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.

MAO

18201820 views1616 comments99 favs

She was as distant as Mao, someone I never met, but whom everyone carried in their eyes,

Robert Penn Warren and Orange County Blue

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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…

Black Widow

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Hair as black as a Raven’s wing. Dark eyes. You wore a black dress, too, my favorite color.

Can I Take My Gun Up To Heaven?

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I thought of Ruth burrowed deep in the nest of her closet and quickly jumped into the footlocker. I nearly stopped breathing as he entered his bunker.

MONSOON

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a beautiful cool quiet day

Circling '84

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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."

Husks

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She would have moved on to the next guy in the next bar, the one who looked like danger on a stick.

Need

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I knew I needed to visit a beach / made entirely of sharks’ teeth

Poems Are Scary Things

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They will take you, naked, and put their tongues and fingers into intimate, erogenous openings

Sidereal

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"...they ran shirtless like pagans under southern stars."

I Was A Republican (For only one day, and it was a long, long, time ago.)

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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…

Waylaid (1999)

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In that mix of sports and religion, TV was what there was of virtue. I thought bars were nicer.

The Solution to All My Problems

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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.

Gods Sense of Humor (April Fools Challenge)

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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…

Existential

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To envy faith, to envy love --// is there a fate more hateful? Choices/ scatter like stars. Too many.

Moles & Scraps

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A starved hunchbacked figure covered in blanket gently steers a one eyed dog along with him. A four legged shadow serving as his longtime companion against the all-consuming vacuum of the universe. A friend for all times.A thin scar runs from his cheekbone to…

Sack of Meat

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The Nurse left work at five o’clock, walking down Dekalb Avenue toward Flatbush. He didn’t frequent the bar closest to the hospital, although he guessed other nurses and doctors from Brooklyn Hospital did. But he liked to pretend that he cared about h

Pollock's Last Snowflake?

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The question posed a voluptuous riddle. Were these frenzied silhouettes gestures of Jackson Pollock’s dribble?

George, Love, Shakespeare and Company

18191819 views88 comments66 favs

"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.)

On The Sly

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She was a sucker punch.

fire and ice

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“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?”

Eat, Pray, Network

18181818 views3131 comments1414 favs

The image was startlingly unfamiliar. Looking at it, no one would guess it had been their last attempt, their last failure. No one would believe that they had never really been that way, or that the life they shared was built on mind games, manipulation a

Please Come to Boston? (Memoir)

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I've been invited to speak at Emerson College in Boston—it will be the summer of 2012, and I'll be speaking on running an online literary magazine; in this case, my own, Anderbo.com.

When Borders was Alive and Well

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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…

When the Songbirds Went Silent in Cheerytown

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What happens to a town when all of its songbirds go on strike?

Brick Walls

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A flash in seven chapters.

Catastrophic, and Not Above Bad Puns

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I laid in the road, broken and alone, until I had no choice but to pull myself together and get out.

Her Dream Princes

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They live a simple life..two solitudes by lamplight.