Most read stories

The Quiet Room by Doug Holder

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I keep my life very ordered. Order for me is security. I am sure of some things. Like the fact I work five nights a week, and sleep during the day.

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.

The Case for Mashed Potatoes

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Steam rolls out of the bathroom as Mr. Larson opens the door with a white towel around his waist. Pepper strolls up to him and purrs as she rubs her long, gray tail against his tanned legs."Hey, girl.” He runs his coarse, scarred fingers through the cat's soft coat.…

Dream Girl

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

Assay the Assail

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No one is a Puritan under all that powder!

Game Night

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We’re all competitive and drunk.

Laughing, Crying

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It was Brad, for short; or so he would say. But really his name was Bradford, and he was a writer. He had almost always lived in New York. He was only half-white. His mother had run away with a black man in the sixties. Her father had told her to never come back to…

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.

Flowers for Our Dead Lovers

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We brought flowers for our dead lovers

The Big Game

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The vampire donated floodlights so the children could play ballgames at night. The lights came on but the dugouts remained vacant. The vampire sat alone in the bleachers. “Sometimes I am less than the sum of my parts,” he said to the sum of his parts.

The Sky-What Limit?

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Lighter-than-air flight was back. The skies of the coast were alight with colorful balloons, dirigibles, and zeppelins tethered to their docking towers along the beach, the huge aircraft bobbing in the breeze up and down the coast for miles,…

Quiet

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He says, You think too much and he grins a grin that has all of the attic keys on a wrought iron ring, on a chain.

If Wishes Were Horses Beggars Would Ride

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Two people are talking. They are both wearing hats.

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.

The Tombwatcher's Tale

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My name is Lu-chen Wyatt, and I have watched this tomb for seven years with undying loyalty. Tomorrow I am going away, and I wish to set down the story of my leaving and to say goodbye to Set-Yi, whose burial place has been my home for so long.

Stumptown Mary

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so one time the Holy Ghost come down to Stumptown

Comes a Little Dog

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Time Holds Ultimately Nothing Dear Except Reunion

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....

The Atlantic

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Phoebe-Lou Adams wrote this of them

Curb Appeal

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He kept the lawn mowed at the perfect height. He mowed it twice a week to one inch. Some weeks he mowed it a third time for good measure.

A Journey of Seven Thousand Miles

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The taste of / what is denied us is always sweet

All I Know About Grandfather

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There were days in my youth when, through no fault of their own, my parents could not drive me the seven mile trip to my elementary school. When I got older they bought me a bike and that proved duly adequate as conveyance. But when I was six years in age

First the Newborn Birds on High and Then the Awful Climbing Beasts

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"Stop watching the news!Because the news contrives to frighten youTo make you feel small and aloneTo make you feel that your mind isn't your own"--MorrisseyThe world has gone crazy, but please let me make you One of my healing songs. You can eat it now, if you…

Pterodactyls

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In his head he thinks oh whatever when I wake this time I shall have a very fine discussion with Someone special, oh but finding meaning in anything nowadays that's Just too much rich flattery, isn't it, filthy mirror? Inside His head's…

Small Change

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Life seemed okay…for the most part.

True Vocation

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After lunch it's vocal coaching: shrieking, screaming, crying Oh-my-God!-Oh-my-God!-Oh-my-God!, panting and face fanning. Next it's ‘situational training', where we pretend to be audience members on real talk shows and practice everything we've learned th

Wrong Number

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The package arrived, delivered to her work as was her preference. She took it to the ladies room and sat on the lounge, carefully opening the box, removing the new black patent leather FMQs, pulling out the tissue paper stuffed into the toes and placing her well-worn…

Considering the Mailman

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It’s not just the mailman. It’s the logo on the mailbox down the street. It’s the uniform. It’s any man or woman in the whole unsettling profession.

Charlie Rose Chats with Mark Twain

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It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.