Most read stories

A Broken Ankle, Canasta, and a Weirdly Sexy Jesus Sighting

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nothing can stop a group of genteel Southern women from a card game, and divine intervention makes one's participation in such an event quite worthwhile

Monster Truck

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In another lifetime the loft had been a shoe factory and I joked how in the dark of night I could hear the ghosts of lost soles speaking in tongues. There was the rolling of eyes, and when I repeated the joke to my therapist, who was actually sitting acr

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…

Dedication

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a special heaven

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

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,…

A Meeting With Qaddafi

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Qaddafi's murder brought an old memory I had forgotten about.

Work Room

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the constant inner jabber

Hungry

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D'ya have to be so rough?

Right and Wrong

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Uncle Tee, a dog handler, taught all the camp children their basics: how to "make change" from a $10-bill, how to slip a hand into ladies' purses, and how to make their smiles warm and endearing.

Doorface

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Doorface has a door for a face. Thus his name. He was born with it. The door in his face, not his name. No one is born with a name. The naming comes later.Doorface finds his unusual physiognomy mildly inconvenient. People keep trying to enter his head. No one likes it when…

The Color of Faith

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My best friend Khaled’s idea was, he’d set up a pool tournament. Nine-ball. Each church would send a player, and whichever church won, he’d join. Any church that wouldn’t shoot pool, he wouldn’t want to join.

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

Flicking On Some Trees, Just To See Your Silly Grin in the Half-Light of the Moon

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The world knows how to make you smile. I'm certain, but it's your own unique grin that they want for themselves. It's always been their perfect prize to horde. The trouble of course comes from wanting something that only exists in…

Coffee

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He picked up a pack of cigarettes and shook it. He flipped the lid to confirm there were none left.

Me, Butterfly Hu, and the Damnable Season

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When the city froze and the darkness began to arrive ahead of rush hour, my pills worked; Butterfly Hu’s did not. In a double blind trial, you can’t know who gets the miracle, and who gets the sugar.

In Passing

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I'm not hungry now The darkness swallows me as they eat. I'm starving now With a pain I can't defeat.

Say Uncle

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People were just doing it. Doing it everywhere. On lawn chairs and stray patio cushions and watching. Watching every one do it.

Lost Dream

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It’s a song you knew once, begin to remember now: You’ve had this dream before.

Brown and Blue

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She was in love with a boy whose eyes were so brown that she sat stopped in the restaurant at the anniversary dinner with the spoon in her slow chocolate fondant. Out of the corner of her eye, around the back of her head, under the table knees knocking

Magnum Opus

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The scaffolding had been difficult to construct. The rock floor of the bluff offered no purchase, so he'd been forced to anchor braces to the trees behind, then span some thirty feet. A cantilevered gallows reached another fifteen feet past the stage...

Wesson

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I'm not. I am.

mnemonic haiku

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skies electric blue,/limpid dewy air, the world/framed by a small farm.

Duck Sauce

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In principle, Sergeant Brock Lumley resisted superstition, but if you were to stop him on any given day he was patrolling Baghdad streets with his rifle squad and ask him to open the front left ammo pouch on his flak vest, he’d get this look on his face..

Crows and the Gunshot

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We'll Thelma-and-Louise it, I urged, Bonnie-and-Clyde it, she bettered, Sundance-and-Butch it, I proffered but she was already leaning in for a kiss.

Five Million Yen: Chapter 1

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The DC-9 bounced in the turbulence over the north Pacific waking the dozing Ben Clarone.

2 and 2

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I was a six year old with no bike. Only the males in my familyhad that privilege. So one morning I got up very early, before the older siblings awoke, crept out the back porch door where Iknew there would be two bikes in the yard just waiting for me and my…

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.

What I wanted 1976

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turn my Dorothy Hamill into a golden shadow

Three Thirds

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"I was hit by an Amtrak train and dragged a hundred feet, and I'm going to die from smoking cigarettes."