Most read stories

Courtly Love, a tail

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They're bound to wonder what sort of offspring we'll hatch. We've done the tests, we are cross-fertile.

Gyre and Gimble

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I’ve done my part of the job in conservative clothing. Lonnie’s done her part looking like Dolly Parton.

FANTASY

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Normally I would have never drank such a wine, but it was late on a Friday evening and the bottle was on the house...

Too Many Toys

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But the boy next door is worse than a dweeb; he's a prima donna and a bully and a little shit to boot. The divorce will only make him more.

At the Fair

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You're on the Ferris wheel, and the wind is blowing just a little bit, and the sky is invisible behind a wash of white clouds, and your little yellow box tips when you look down, down to the fairway swinging. In the boxes below grandmothers are shrieking …

Christmas Magic

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You know what parents have to do to get an Xbox? They don't just stand in line and someone hands them an Xbox, OK? That's sacrifice. They have to sacrifice and sacrifice and sacrifice. I mean, I chase alpacas a mile every night in subfreezing conditions,

Why We Were Arrested

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We have a responsibility,” she says, “to enrich our local business community while delivering quality products to customers.” She had brought over some application forms for the Better Business Bureau, and we sit at the big table and fill them out, marki

Basal Distance

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are you like the rest of us and you disagree with war yes i said i disagree with war and he said only one man agrees with war but he won t go to the war

The Heart

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My wife and I were looking for a "fixer-upper." We were strange that way. We were leaving a rental which had cat tunnels built into the walls. One villa we toured had a heartbeat. In the basement, in place of a well pump, was a heart made of fibrous roots which had…

Snatch 8 (the zombie flash sequence--it never dies)

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Oh, gracious mercy, oh...

The Tale of Gary Von Gross

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Gather 'round children, For it's high time to tell, The story of a strange man With a horrible, awful smell. For this is a story More disgusting than most. This is the gruesome tale Of Gary Von Gross. With a house made…

Mean People Suck

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He said his wife levitated.

secrets

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Don’t worry about what went aloud. I said nothing.

In A-B-C Order

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When she was nineteen, she began to brew a baby in her belly. She named it, and sang to it, and organized the leftover hand-me-downs that hadn't been worn ragged through by the first seven sets of recipients.

Dark Heart

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When we take Vengeance,/ shave and shower him,/ deodorize and scent him,/ clothe him in a starched shirt

Ackermann

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When he took Medieval German Lit in graduate school, Ackermann read Der Ackermann aus Böhmen by Johannes von Tepl. His professor was amused both by his last name and that his grandparents were Germans from Bohemia. Of course, only his grandmother was from Bohemia and…

Bootsy Goes on a Bender

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Bootsy awoke with a hangover that only brain surgery could cure, a hangover that caused a seam to open in the known universe, leaving Bootsy on one side while all other matter sped away, away.

Graduation

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and i'm almost out of cigarettes, and fireworks and sorority girls scream from down the street.

Best Place To Eat in Town

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Often I eat lunch at the hospital. The cafeteria may be the best place to eat in town.

Cheese (train writings)

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"This tastes like goat cheese," I said.

Procedural

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Val walks through the world, absorbed in the day to day. A plainspoken narrator drones on in his mind. The nondescript voice marks time to the beat of Val's banal footfall, hums along with the whir of Val's modest, midsize sedan. The narration is loudest in the twilight…

Motel 6

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He lit another reed - a new score orchestrating in his head - his thoughts swirling around the older man; there was something else going on here…

From The Chronicles of His Demise

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I am not the wind./ I am a stone eroded by the wind

The Glass Shop

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She burst Into the glass shop

13 fragments of a somniloquy, overheard by a burglar lost in the basement complex on midsummer night

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1. there's nothing more to say about it and I don't want to be drawn2. beautiful she couldn't hear me anyway I was desperate and there were moths3. they'd replaced his head with a picture of the moon he looked4. none of them were speaking English more like a ticking a…

Dad, August 10, 2010

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Satchmo sings a love song over the sound system. People read books, tap keyboards, drink coffee, eat cake. In Barnes & Noble—more a coffee shop these days than a bookstore—I am thinking about my dad and his stomach cancer.The terror he…

February 1975 Lansing, MICHIGAN

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Ripper the dog died after eating a Quarter which had lodged in Ripper's throat choking her to death. Steve Latino buried her in the backyard the next morning. He felt nothing…

Fuzzy Mollis

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My small kitchen has barely enough room to turn around in, yet I had the feeling I was being watched. When I experience it again, just seconds later, I realize it was eyes watching, actual eyes, not a camera or machine.

Par Delicatesse

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I know what he meant. I've been in the 3 A.M. cream cheese. I've known the hole in the bagel.

Sounds

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They try to incorporate a little of Ravel around their edges, the ones where their molecules bump off into other parallel realities, into other non-localities, into other potentials. She isn't buying it. She's tuned in. And she can tell.