Most read stories

77 Words About Nothing (Triad)

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My mind has started to finish thoughts at 77 Words. These are just a few.

The Crickets Try to Organize Themselves Into Some Raucous Pentameter.

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A secret search rolled from Odette's eyes. A gulch split her down the middle and she had the world believing this was the way she liked it. Odette was a woman who spent entire days bending backward within herself, never letting on that she was…

Test Day

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“I need an ambulance, we found a baby in a ditch.”

Harvesting Brains Pastoral

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A bawdy secretary languishes behind the farmer, translating the squealing gray matter and scratching her rectangular nose obsessively.

The Road To Baghdad

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In late summer 2000 Dick Cheney held a secret strategy meeting in a hunting lodge deep in the hills of southeastern Wyoming. It was Cheney's own place, bought with the money he'd ripped from the trough with both hands through decades of what…

The Cold Never Bothered Anything Anyways

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What kind of person would she be remembered as if she died over night and someone looked in her freezer? She took out a package of bacon from the freezer that was dated 2009.

Tilly Artaud

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After not going out for weeks, I went to a bar and met an electrical engineer, a motorcycle racer who raced in the Black Hills, a Renaissance man, in a relationship with a young married woman, and I told him about the toad.

Letter to the Bean Factory

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The figure was covered in a light blue chenille bathrobe, splayed out on her back on the floor by the glass door, her hair done up in large curlers, a slipper lying askew by her left foot. Richie crouched near the face and the rancid flame of bourbon lea

Epitaph N+1

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We die in order to get some rest

Zombies Calling

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The zombie apocalypse was long foretold as a rather exciting bit of bother involving shotguns and chainsaws, but the reality of it is rather depressingly boring.

Phantom head syndrome

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The Bird King suffers from phantom head syndrome. Ever since his decapitation by a critic, he has felt pain where his head used to be. Sometimes it wakes him in the night. It's so excruciating, he fumbles for a saw. But alas! there's nothing to chop off.He's seen every…

Medusas

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I didn’t kiss Odgeir because I fancied him, I kissed him because I knew other people fancied him.

A House Made of Stars

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My cousin had put them up last year, showed me when we stood on her bed as her fingers pointed, traced over the outlines, then turned out the lights, so that I could see them glow.

The Woman Who Cut Down Her Husband

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The woman carried a wooden log which was her husband into the house.

Tradition and the Individual Talent

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Wee-wee-sweet-pea me? I live, I weep, a third of me passed in sleep, start a scene or two, play and dance the fool, …

Contagious Blinking

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He pulls on his wispy goatee and shifts his weight a few times from one foot to the other. That doesn’t help. It rarely does, to be honest.

Kitchen Knife (n.)

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Kitchen Knife (n.)1. A standard kitchen tool consisting of a sharp blade attached to a handle intended for cutting, peeling, chopping, slicing, and dicing.2. Used primarily for food preparation (see also BUTCHERING; BACKSTABBING; JACK THE RIPPER; DEATH BY A THOUSAND…

Cripple

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"I know," Timothy explained, "he can't use it. He's a cripple." No one else seemed to understand.

Fat Man in a Blizzard

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There he was. Minnesota Fats, short and pudgy, jowly and blond-haired.

The Strongest Girl in the World

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At the edge of the forest, his sister began to complain about how everybody—their mother and father and all of her friends included—hated her. It was exasperating, the light she sometimes put herself in. The fact of the matter was that she received more

To the Bonfire Rhumba (ELECTRIC DELIRIUM 1.9)

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The night is a jelly slosh, a fertile rumble, a rhumba, black and seeping, thick. An arm rises.

MY BOYFRIEND WAS A LUNATIC

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Had I scoured all five boroughs of New York I couldn’t have found a more perfect imperfect object for my affections. Morgan was crazy as a loon, with the common sense of a mackerel and the emotional stability of a canary. But believing love could conquer

Marion, Texas

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Marion had decided to stop whenever she came upon Amarillo. It was close to two a.m. when she pulled into the motel parking lot. Momma, read the nametag on the woman at reception. Her face was illuminated by a TV. Her hair curlers were illuminated by the lone desk lamp…

Perversion

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“It’s a sad thing,” I said, “when a man has to suffer just for getting a little on the side.”

A Bear Story

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In the spring, my father would dress for class in a bear costume and chase students around campus.

Whale Lessons

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Even if your heart is as large as a small car, your tongue as heavy as two grown men—even then—you will have to carry it with you wherever you go.

Birth and Death of a Concrete Icon

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Homer relaxes in his tan, faded recliner, remote in hand, and watches death unfold on his television.

Wednesdays They Pay Us, But Now It's Thursday

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fire rolls through the drive-thru

Potsdamer Strasse

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She stared unbreakingly, confident, knowing; and talked so close to my face I felt cornered. But her voice was something, low and smooth.

Walking To Gibraltar, Chapter 6: In Which Moral Boundaries Are Set

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The first time they were separated, he rediscovered music and writing.