Most read stories

Three Stanzas Ending with a Line from R. Crumb

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The squirrels will not stop peeing on the trees.

Actual Reality

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Travel into the beautiful swirling being you occupy whenever you get the chance. It's your right to seek the name of the most holy one in your deepest awakening. Then will you most likely find fellow travelers splashing about in their naked auras in…

221B Baker Street, London; 1:37 a.m.

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He lays his piping accoutrement on the bedside table, removes his cap, brocaded jacket, boots and slacks. Holmes brushes gently, the back of his hand across the confused face of Watson— their…

Mice

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Short, but true. Damnit.

The Last Bailout

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In desperation, the city council imported a shaman to exorcise whatever demons had possessed the house.

Wednesdays They Pay Us, But Now It's Thursday

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fire rolls through the drive-thru

Parabola Tango

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Is there a recipe for / lasting happiness?

Kazooed

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"I've been on eight blind dates in three days," she tells me. I can't quite work the math out, but somehow the combination of her wildly undulating eyebrows and harsh vocal tone manage to convince me."I can play the kazoo," I tell her. It's my one saving grace--the thing…

March Madness

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“I’ll be damned,” he said. “I never knew where that was.”

Purple IV

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Purple not rain! I guess Prince left. It is said that Prince owned the aquifer under Jordan, Minnesota, and that he sold it but to whom? And moved to Canada—

A Deaf Man

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Billy had crystal blue eyes A small mouth And long hair to cover up his Hearing aids. He told me once, with his hands How he liked to submerge His head in water and yell So loud he could feel it. "I can hear myself that way," he…

Stories Around People

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Stories Around People An Event Facebook lived in midtown, for there the people and windows shone like water. Though it would board the bus—1 day—and ride to the sea, where people said words like sea and where the city shone in the waves…

The Fat Man's Third Wife

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They say it was like an elephant married to a dove. Imagine, me, a dove! Ridículo!

Bogart Generations

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Great Uncle did stunts in silents and shot a man in a cowboy one-reeler, then vanished to the hills like Roy Earle in High Sierra.

I Like it This Way

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Through its branches we saw a couple. Teenagers, narrow and pale, two young birch trees, their roots twisted, submerged in the water.

The Paris American

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He returned to America on the Fourth of July. Twisting in his cramped window seat miles above the Atlantic, he buckled up before the descent. “You can handle this,” he muttered. Hungover, still reeling from the dreamy head-turning experience of…

Cancer Always Calls Collect - Part 1

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Again, that was not the man I once knew. If they were taking Las Vegas odds; I should be the one dealing with this first. Why was it him and not me?

Sunrise at the Cock and Cooter Motel

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Difference 'twixt night and day

Poets and Roadkill

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It is indisputable that poets love roadkill...

A Brooklyn Tale

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"Everything except food and sex."

The Law of Natural Selection

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Once a student brought him a jar of black widow spiders. Tony put it on his desk. Somehow the jar got tipped over, and the spiders got out.

Arlene

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His mother was not an aw-come-here-honey-and-give-me-a-hug type mom. She was the kind of mother who, if you had some kind of problem, would suggest that perhaps it might be a good idea to volunteer (she was really big on volunteering) at some sort of orga

Maître d’

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Before the days of “customer experience,” Eddie figured out whatever information he could about his clients. He asked them for business cards, recorded their phone numbers from the reservation book, snapped photos of them in his mind…

Notes for a Life. In a Swing. No Wind to Speak of.

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Somewhere a banjo, somewhere a hound.

The Little Dog from Outer Space

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I looked at her, shook my head and tried to smile. She smiled back, beaming a radiance that pushed away the chill.

When Spring Comes Will the Grass Grow by Itself?

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Lila began to hear whispers coming from her home's air vents and quickly assumed people were watching her. Maybe that was why the yard was not progressing she thought. The unknowns talking to her through the vents had control over everything she did.

Confessions of a Liturgical Voyeur

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...when she spoke, her voice still seemed to spill bourbon from a heavy crystal tumbler, and drift cigarette smoke in a dark paneled room.

Twister

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The rain pelted down, it got dark, and they couldn't see a thing. The wind roared like a thousand locomotives.

A Quantum of Disappointment

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Reality winks at us then scampers off

Cranshaw at the Dinner Party / Cranshaw, the Cause of Wit in Others

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“What does the future hold?”