Most read stories

Poop

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That’s what she left behind, and I put it in my mouth and swallowed.

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.

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?

The Eleventh Commandment

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I never thought I’d miss the sound of church bells, reminding me of my sudden apostasy, faintly ringing over the rumpus where even the birds can’t get a word in edgeways.

Layers

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"... Sometimes I think I'm so close to knowing what it's all about, to knowing myself, and then sometimes everything seems so hopeless, as if I haven't learned a thing."

The Chance of Rain

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

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…

The Spoken World

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The spoken world is bigger than I had ever imagined it to be, wonderful and relentless and unforgiving, and to be a part of it was my grandest childhood fantasy. I don’t know what the world sees me as now, but inside I will always be a stutterer.

The Fergus Incident

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Fergus Winston, a former accountant from New York, finds himself mixed up in the middle of a trafficking operation in small town Iowa.

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…

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…

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.

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…

77 Words About Last Night

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Blacked-out out on junk, I bet money on a sport I hated just last year.

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.

Abandonment

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The ideas just came to them. "Nothing On" consisted of a television on a small stand, playing an endless loop of "Jersey Shore." "Shopping Bores Me" was a men's flannel shirt from American Apparel on an otherwise empty rack.

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."

MYTHO-THERAPY ON THE BLINK

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Once upon a time, not so long ago in Los Angeles, Jack and Jill Woodman’s father remarried.

little incidence - (haiku love series - #1)

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you choose to be mine when you take hold of my hand - silently, i'm yours

Swimming with Whales

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The plan was this: We would take our first vacation. My husband and I would take our 2 ½-year-old son Ethan and 13-month-old son Jonas to Mystic, Connecticut, a 90 minute drive from our home outside of Boston. We would stay at the Hilton, which was right near the Aquarium,…

The Hiders

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The Kharal kept us safe, we knew, kept the colony functional in the oft belabored effort that was living our small, human lives surrounded by death, for in their ring of constant invisible protection, when they did not come, we thrived. It was not as tho

Catholics

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Sundays after Mass, Sister Edburga gathered the team in the shower room, we stripped naked in a circle, held hands and said a prayer we’d win our game. A boy no one knew walked alongside her with a box full of jockstraps.

Stones

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

The Garden of Earthly Delights

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When I come to suck fresh raspberries' juice from your hair pressing the clasp of my mouth's purse on the oyster of your ear;

The Martians Are Coming

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"I read a cute animal story yesterday," I tell them. "And I was filled with rage. I can't live like this. There must be no more bears, or hamster-bears, or manatees, being hopeless and depressed. There must be no more cute animal stories—ever."

Anhedonia (excerpt 2)

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Crazy. I really hate when people use that word.

The Kiss

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"Dude!" James smacked Peter's head. "Don't be a jerk. Did you get a look at her or not?" Peter said, "I didn't really see her face. Is she hot? Do you wanna kiss her face?"

GOING NOWHERE

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you may meet the man of your dreams.

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.