Most read stories

Drift

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Dreams & foghorns.

Marjan’s Tooth

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When my feet touched the ground on the tarmac at Bagram I cannot begin to describe the feeling I had. It was as if God had spoken to me directly, whispering in the cold mountain air: “Son of Marjan, I welcome you.” The feeling took hold and overcame m

The Edge of Night

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The night wrapped its arms around us as we drove west, taking the highway past Medford towards Philly. The kids were asleep in the backseat and we were both counting the mile markers, staring out the windows with quiet eyes. I listened to the drone of the…

Crackle

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As he brushes his shoulders against other people's shoulders until he almost has no shoulders –

A Clue Found Aboard a Zen Mind's Floating Iceberg

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I do so want to bring you into the sacred linguistically eternal loop of all ordinary things on earth, but it can so easily turn into a very sudden unsparing trapdoor, or a hissing angry knot tying up itself into even more tricky sorts …

True Romance '66

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First thing each morning, Miss Murgy, a tall witch of a woman, cornered both of us like she did every day. "Girls…" with that she clinked a tea spoon on a shot glass, "do I have your attention?" "Yes, m'am," Vicky said. 6 a.m., six…

He Brings Things Closer

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Behind the plastic kitchen, where the special children sometimes sit, a large boy in tight dungarees had grabbed Stephanie's hair in one fist.

Writer's Cough

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Ok, so I’m sitting here trying to write through a frigging cold. And I. . .Oops, . . . . . . wait a sec!. . . I’m stopped, astounded, stunned between coughing my left lung clear over my keyboard and watching it flopping on the back of my desk. . .

Faith, Hope, and Charity

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She wears three or four tattered sweaters on cool days. She pushes a basket borrowed from a grocery store. There is a plastic lawn bag in the basket with God knows what inside.

Security

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Her preferred post-coital activity is to pant, to suck in air with urgent greed.

Lule of Raw - 3

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"I'll tell you one thing I don't want to see, armed confrontation, leading to domestic warfare."

The Moral of This Story Is

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Always take the train.

The Galleries

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We invent our beauties// as we find them and engineer/ our horrors

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…

Gregory Dates a Witch

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None of us took it too seriously when Gregory from underwriting said he was dating a real-life witch. Being an underwriter is not as interesting as say being a writer. That's why the greatest underwriter in America, Ajit Jain, gets paid per hour what Jame

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..."

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.

Three Degrees of Separation from the Same Thing We Were Still Supposed to be Thinking About

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It was hard to believe that, even very recently, there had been first days of school where nothing happened.

Writing Coach Helps Blocked Women Tap Inner Meanness

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“Susan,” he says menacingly, as if he’s a husband who’s caught a cheating wife in a discreet liaison with another man. “I thought I made myself clear about this sort of thing.”

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.

Creator

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

Criminals

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What about the goons? Those criminals thwarted and left for dead in every action movie for the past thirty years. I'm sure at least a dozen survived the slaughters. I'm sure at least one or two came out if it reformed. This one who quit working for Columbian drug smugglers…

Please Take

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I have a ball-pein hammer in my coat pocket.

Restland,

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He died a printer finding late/ after so much selling himself selling/ a craft that pleased and paid enough

Heather.

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Gone Heather, with her hands in her hair, silent for help, over-involved now scared.

Pharaoh

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Altodog was dressed in filthy chef’s trousers and a long-sleeved purple dress shirt, somewhat dignified by a tattered black vest.

WOMAN DISPOSED OF

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sex trafficking

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…