Most read stories

the morality of pens: a sonnet

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poets can kill, or at least they once could:/ perhaps poems tamed us, if they are any good.

Texas

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Cleaning the dust bunnies from under our lives, Zin says she wants to move to the country, maybe someplace as big as Texas. She claims that lately she's having trouble breathing between bricks or talking to hot chestnut vendors with rubber faces. It's giving her nightmares…

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…

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

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Somewhere a banjo, somewhere a hound.

Why They Cried: Jisette

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There was that long weekend she'd spent lazing around a suite at the Beverly Wilshire between the Golden Globes and the Oscars with the suddenly now married actor, and then there had been Cabo. This was before the current thing and before the thing before

Outfit

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Momma called them Vaughens, "a outfit," and said, "they shoulda throwed the book at that Darla Jean."

Yakkety-Yak

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Last night, the station played me a dream of sexual promiscuity that included -- but was not limited to -- imaginative acts involving....

A Brooklyn Tale

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"Everything except food and sex."

The Atlantic

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Phoebe-Lou Adams wrote this of them

I will be your girlfriend, Sam Pink

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I don't really know, though. I've been locked in a beer cave for the last ten years of my life. I was just let out by some frat boys who were looking for Natty Light.

Salt Thought

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The custard of eternity is scooped into the quantum cone of knowledge and drips out the bottom one lifetime at a time.

Suspended

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In the beginning the revolution was all motion and energy. When the President for Life resigned motion and energy disappeared with the sounds of clapping hands.

Borden, Dream on Lord of the Pies.

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A plague of dykes mattered not. This spider-girl had driven the world of thought from Borden’s mind.

Assay the Assail

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No one is a Puritan under all that powder!

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!

The Man Who Lived Amongst the Cannibals

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“Ah Willie! Ah my boy! You poor sweet faced youth. Gone now! Our memories, Willie, our memories will haunt us forever with your laughter, your joy, your enduring excuses, your misspellings & badly slanted penmanship. Oh Willie. My boy. Gone & gone f

Fear the Future: 25 Brief Tales in Various Keys of Woe, Fear, and Loathing

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The three were up early to await the deer with rifles, ammunition, and coffee.

Life of Charlotte

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A wall of icons can be beautiful if you don’t look closely at the hands. The hands tell stories of too short lives and unrequited love.

The Dog

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They stood at the intersection waiting for the light to change so they could cross the highway.

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…

If Wishes Were Horses Beggars Would Ride

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Two people are talking. They are both wearing hats.

Encasement

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A universe, all of it, was encased in glass.

A Thousand Books

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I gave away 1000 books.

The Queue

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She persisted. “How long have we been here?” A note of anger crept into his voice. “How long? How long? Why …, why ….” He swallowed hard, realized he had forgotten.

Dream Girl

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There was something wrong with this picture. Was he the man she had slept with last night?

laundry

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She’d once read the Time-Life Encyclopedia on The Universe and became obsessed with the woman from Alabama who was singled out, by a rock from a far place, in her sleep.

Golgotha

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They were starting to get winded. The boy, his father and his little brother were hiking up a hill, cutting a diagonal path through hay-colored grass towards an outcrop of craggy boulders below the hill's summit.

Faith

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your leather jacket zip has left a row of teethmarks on her arm

Cheque Republic

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Maybe she thinks in Czech, dreams in German, pretends in English. Babylon is a beautiful place after all.

How to Have a Fulfilling Sexual Relationship with Your Own Parents (Part One)

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Hi, I'm Alexander Payne. I hate sex.