Most read stories

The Conversation Killer

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I stand corrected once more.

Halfway Out The Door

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She asks if I only write about men, which I tell her is redundant. I also answer, “Yes, but sometimes I write about them as race cars, hyenas, vaginas, or God.” She smirks like she wants to smile, but it’s stuck halfway out her door. Her happiness has

A Little Bit of Syrup

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"I made up my mind then, in the backseat, sucking on a cherry Popsicle, that I wanted to be like Ruby’s mother..."

The Lake

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The Lake I. When the weather was nice, the fisherman and his girl spread a blanket over the shore's rough sand and watched the cargo ships cleave their way to the…

Talking Down the Flames

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She'd always been an odd girl, nearly raising herself. As she got breasts and hips the boys complained that she was easy to get in the backseat, but afterward the car wouldn't run, not ever, like the engine died the moment they used her willingness up. So

Afterwards

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It takes twelve years for the hot water to run out and your skin has not even begun to prune.

Dead Woman's Shoes

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Loving you, I always knew, was a job I’d only get via a dead woman’s shoes. There you were, the recipient of pot roasts, fresh bread, at a loss amongst neighbourhood widows and divorcees. A tide of them rolled over you in calico blouses, cut off jeans

Scene from the Clinic

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No way to know why she's here, but scars and scabs can hold more information than a file or chart.

PTSD

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My therapist told me I have post traumatic stress disorder My uncle had that He fought in the war I guess I fought in my own kind Not between countries Between children and father Between husband and wife Between addiction and sobriety When my father got…

Refuge

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cotton balls in your ears do not deafen you to the rocking of your mother's bed...as she and the new uncle set forth on the turbulent sea of their maiden voyage.

Creator

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What purpose other than misery/ can cancer serve? And Parkinson's,/ AIDS, and STDs?

Edward Ogle the Third

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Assimilated wheat germ integrated ant worm the capital of brazil.

Future Imperfect, a Jeremiad

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the birth of a long, dark age// where the wealthy will be eaten by the poor/ and the poor will be eaten by disease

Miss Havisham's Fire

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. . . catching her breath somewhere between ecstasy and surprise. . .

Sky Without a Song

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He hung up and I sang some whiney lyric about wanting him back. You know the songs that say the same shit: I’m an idiot. Love me anyway. I’m Velcro with nothing to stick to and you’re a nappy surface that gives me a reason to exist.

The Death of Childhood Heroes (or "Roadkill")

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We were pushing ninety down the highway through a stretch of what rightfully should have been called the Badlands. We were both absorbed and coping with the rapidly escalating stages of desperation and so neither of us noticed when the yellow figure stepped…

Let’s do something with this

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No way was Robert actually surprised that hewas competitive with himself, but there was something way more concrete about this. Instead of hand wringing, there was someone, Bob, that he could punch.

I used to think the sun was the moon

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I imagined the sun to be the moon and discovered it was not on a road trip in California where I noticed the sun on one side and the moon on the other.

SMOKE & MIRRORS

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These days I wear a flag pin.

Hands

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I love to watch Kim work. She styles and cuts hair. When she is working on a customer, she is all business. The look on her face is priceless.

The Dark

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Outlined against the thinly layered darkness of the room, there is a silhouette of a small boy with his feet pulled up to the chin, failing to hold its own against the thousand stares from the deep violating the stillness of his room, their long familiarity with the…

77 Words About Saturday

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Another Saturday in April. Another set of scars.

Clockwork

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At any moment, she'll come outside to pick up the day’s newspaper. He can see it resting beneath the blooming crape myrtle, its plastic wrapper glistening with dew.

SoliTaire

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She couldn’t help but wonder what 93 year-old Sohrabjee looked for in the torn, dusty lithograph of Marilyn in Persia one of the orderlies had stuck to the wall of the corridor outside Jasmine Wing decades ago.

Understudy

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All young and loud and big and I swear her face like a lighthouse lamp, glowing—I remember thinking, ‘She’s drunk at nine in the morning.’

Internet Hole (an excerpt from Psychopomp)

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Seventeen-year cicadas are the sometimes-singers that surprise spring with the ugliest mouths of all.

'So I fucked Beavis ... so WHAT??'

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[CAUTION: "DISINTEGRATION OF THE FUNCTIONING PSYCHE," IS, APPARENTLY, A "DEEPLY PERSONAL" EXPERIENCE!"]

Verboten

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Scales were installed on station platforms. Those who were overweight were turned away

Storage Access Framework

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At first we thought metadata rich, non-hierarchical, network based, multi-provider filesystems were our future. An arduous journey but well worth the efforts for the beforehand unimaginable user experiences enabled by new technologies that thereupon displaced the…

The Moral of This Story Is

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Always take the train.