Most read stories

A Natural Consequence of Things

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Belief is a hammer, like saying the mind is a piece of iron.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergere. Manet

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The mystery is in the barmaid's impersonal stare It's all there. Recognizable the bottles of Bass Ale and Crème de Menthe. Glazed oranges piled in a bowl Two roses in a small clear glass of water A wide gold bracelet on her arm, halfway up from

Mule

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Sometimes cats had to die or dogs

Bon Bons

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love notes yellowed through the years

A Chaos Theory

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—with spinster goddesses in the middle of things / circling looms.

The Haunting

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the ugliness will not be denied

David and Goliath

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The giant hurled threats and insults. He brandished a knife that was a foot long.

Jambalaya

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Your writing offended the editors greatly, and we would select certain word choices we disliked, but we truly hated every word, including mere articles, prepositions, and conjunctions.

Pumpkin Patch

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Artie invited me to go with him to pick out a Halloween Pumpkin for the house. I had recently moved into a communal living situation and we were still getting to know each other. Artie was the kind of person who made a special occasion out of ordinary life. Why…

The Birth of Girma Dali

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Amid the swerve and pulse of hungry bodies Girma Dali picks his spot, a tissue-wide patch of net where's he going to strike. A green-jerseyed defender closes in on him his brute momentum unleashed like a kamikaze pilot swooping into enemy orbit, his lunging body makes…

The Same

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The bus is late; the papers disappear. The china breaks, and the suit does not fit.

Clicking

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Reining her small hands around the molded handle grips, her bottom bouncing athwart and wildly off the seat, Symphony wrenches her center of gravity inward, commandeering as much control from the road it would allow. With her breaks behaving as stubborn

"Hadrian's Farewell" as Tanka and Haiku

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Little rambling soul,/kind guest, friend: leave me laughing,/pallid stiff, and bare.

Hermano Sandwich

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His mouth smiled but his icy eyes did not. "You like it?," he asked with a thin deflated voice. "Old family recipe. Enjoy."

Welcome to the Dark Walls

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“No one ever notices everything: but sometimes it happens, when no one is noticing everything, everyone misses the same thing in the same moment . . ."

The Madness of the Gods

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“Have you heard about Lucius?” The lawyer turned to the carpenter. “They say he's gone mad. Just gone; the madness of the gods.” Sitting in the barbershop were the former two, one in his forties and the other of his fifties; a gray-haired…

That Which Does Not Kill You (Only Postpones The Inevitable)

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Harold Smithe awoke that Tuesday morning precisely at 6 am. He did this every day for as long as he could remember. Even on the weekends when his schedule varied. Well, varied slightly. He lay in bed trying to wake up and mulled over the things he needed to accomplish for…

Three Network News Ledes on the Death of Jimmy Buffet

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“He spent four lonely days in a brown L.A. haze, and now Jimmy Buffet is dead.” —Brian Williams, NBC Nightly News “Jimmy Buffet—beloved parrot-head singer-songwriter—has given up his search for that lost shaker of salt. He…

Dragon Lady

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What happened later that evening is unclear. When Mickey got back to his quarters, he was in good spirits. Buoyant even.

Graeme King and the Creature

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Graeme King was disturbed. He sat at his desk feeling his bloodshot eyes rolling backwards, impatient, leaden in their sockets. Could he believe what he had just seen? Surely not. Surely the late nights spent absorbing the relentless pulse of his computer screen…

Sparrow and Mockingbird Greet the Dawn

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feathered waves of tangerine peach

Saga of the Sugar Ants

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They’re persistent, I’ll give them that. They keep coming. And coming and coming.

South 55

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This is a wife pregnant with spiders

To All the Lights

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I have nothing in me but a raw loneliness right now. It's as if someone whirl-winded me out of the sky into the middle of the ocean in the middle of the red faced night. My fate seems immobile, sealed, doomed to a rocking nothingness, like…

Gateway to the Continent

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I got to Victoria station at quarter to eleven on a Friday with nothing but a small leather bag and the vague idea of getting out of London.

No More Tears

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When Bill was in the hospital, one month bleeding into the next, his mother visited exactly twice, both times complaining of the things she needed or couldn’t get rid of: mop heads, bleach, dustpans, detergents, grease, turgid water in the basement. And

Is That You, Bugs?

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Poor kid. She didn't mean to leave my business card on her kitchen counter next to the telephone. It was a mistake.

PORNOGRAPHY

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PORNOGRAPHY First He went across the floor to where she sat. One sleeve of her shirt dropped to show her shoulder, salted and brown. One hundred fish filled the wave. Now, he said. Now is now. Second The car wouldn't…

Interstate

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By Jackson, you called and said, I'll be too drunk to drive. Hell, if I do my very best, I could be blind by Shreveport.

We Don't Need a Guitar Man

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The courtroom smelled a lot like mold and it was hot as you could imagine. I sweated through my shirt and wondered if he wasn’t dying under his robe. He looked down at me from his bench and I just knew he was going to call me a commie and sentence me to l