Most read stories

A Clean Tent

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“No,” he says. A simple lie. “I -” He pushes the sleeping bag off of his legs. Their getaway reset was a mistake.

All the Broken People

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We all// fall short and fail.

Smite the hindmost of them, Joshua 10:19

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Marlene smiles at me with her lips pressed together. The young girl standing with her can't be more than fourteen or fifteen although she is tall for her age. She too smiles. She has an intricate set of braces on her teeth. I can't tell if Marlene has teeth

The Men Who Forgot Math and Poetry

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"They treat us like shit," the mathematician said. "They think they can just take us and electrocute us and drown us."

Right Now

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I want to talk like Rose Tyler, and be whisked away by the strapping Docor, preferably in David Tennant form.

Rooftop

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People crawling up out of the chimney, then onto the roof, then sliding down it and off over the edge disappearing from view.

Free Time

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The desk calendar was brilliant, unused. The problems with it didn't begin until March.

The man-faced boy

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And so the man-faced boy grew alone, knowing little of kindness and love. As he grew, he explored the limits of his cold world; crawling in dusty nappies, toddling in hand-me-down rags, at last walking on worn sandals, haunting the edges of human life loo

The Chance of Rain

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I'm still working on this. I'm always open to your thoughts.

Itch

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Clayton had a grin like the hand of a beast that stretched as long as her gravel road...

Stones

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At the graveyard, the leaves had been raked into loose array....

Keep the Change

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Jacob could tell it was a man he had just walked past, a broken man with an olive green Vietnam era military jacket, a man who had probably served his country as honorably as anyone chosen at lottery and forced to kill for a subsistence wage…

A man with bleeding hands

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A man with bleeding hands at the back door of Out of the Closet this morning asked me for the bride and groom figurines at the top of my donation box

Grand Union

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She suggested just moving in together. A lot less constrained by convention she, on occasion, did not wear a bra.

Interview With a Pimp

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He went to the switchboard and rang one of the rooms. I moved away to a discreet distance so he could make his pitch in private, and soon he came back to the desk front. "He d-didn't like it much, b-but he said to s-send you up. Room 412."

Bile: The 'Sexiest' Fluid You Can Share with Other People

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[SABATOGE!]

It's a Beautiful Banana Moon

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and I can't help it if it is. I know it won't stay that way for long, but for now that's all I've got to work with, shining in my window, made of all eight fingers and a couple of thumbs. But the latest pushy words still want to give…

Hygiene

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I peed on Rick’s toothbrush. I nearly repented and cleansed it with hydrogen peroxide in the middle of the night. But I didn’t.

Subj: re: doing time ...

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The jail, where I stayed for 48 hours, gave me enough information to write a 180-page book, something I resisted setting out upon due to the insult of it.

Forever Four-Eyed

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I'm a librarian. A reader. I identify as a four-eyed person. I've always worn glasses. I got my first pair in the second grade. It was a miracle! The blurry world I'd inhabited all my life suddenly came into focus. I could see the blackboard! I could read street signs! I…

A D O N I S

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They sprinkled me in the holes of Auburn Maine. They covered me in grain, and salmon colored sand. My shell had swirls of chartreuse, and chocolate painted on it. I was made from glass and Gods left eye. Picked and sorted through, we all landed into a tiny paper bag…

Luc

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Her wrinkles came into focus, the sort of old woman's face photographed for coffee tables and art galleries and corporate boardrooms, for prize juries and grant selection committees, and Luc searched his formidable memory for an exact match. Over the long, tedious…

Roy G. Biv

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Perhaps a blue person is more alive underneath than a red. Red is eye-catching and flashy, but blue is substantial, secretive. Of course, blood is red, and there’s nothing more substantial than blood, but we’re on blue at the moment, and the thought

Oaxaca Dreamland

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She thinks she trusts this man; she wants to trust him. His face reminds her of a man who once took care of her on an airplane when she was a kid traveling by herself.

Quasimodo Casanova

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After shooing away the filthy pigeons and closely inspecting the bench, he squinted with his good eye at a second-page article on noise abatement headphones.

Ghost Questions

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What if I never feel like a real artist? What does it even mean to be a "real" artist? What if nobody ever cares about what I make?

Extortionist

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They leaned against the hood of his pickup, which sat heavy on its wheels, the back of it filled with the things that he’d held out of the yard sale three days earlier. “When’re you leaving?” she asked. “Early. Get on down the road. Shut ’er down ea

Cake

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A little poem

The Cruelest Man

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He was arrested for a horrible crime. It took more than three weeks to identify the body. The newspapers were vague so as not to terrify anyone. He hung his head low as he pled guilty.

Land of Our Fathers

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He called me one Friday when I was a kid and told me he wanted to go trout fishing. He had dreamt that I was a worm or a fly -- he couldn't remember which -- but he was sure I would bring good luck to the stream. The next morning, before grandma awoke, I