Most read stories

Very Short Stories And Pictures Of Ducks

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...the loving and very painful hurt of our daily sustenance

The Piano Player’s Dead Rejoice

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Requires one of those leaps.

Last Bell

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Coward, cuckold, she taunts: So be it. He's not a young man anymore, nor as clever as he once was, or thought.

The thing is

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It was not that he was boring – it’s just that he needed a lot of encouragement. When he came, he whispered to himself, ‘ohgodohgodohgod’ - like it was something to be ashamed of, to be sorry for. I wanted to hold him close against me but I also n

Don't Mangle the Mongol

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Back in the Dark Ages, the Mongols invented the first hamburger pattie. They put slabs of beef under their horses' saddles and after a few miles of rough riding -- voila! a flattened piece of cow meat. They then proceeded t

Literally Choose Your Own Adventure

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You enter the lobby of the office building tentatively at first - you're a little nervous about this interview, after all - but you recall how spectacular and professional you dressed that morning. Plus you read through the company's LinkedIn profile at least five times…

The Troupe

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A performance is a series of situations. Each situation defines the characters that are in it.

Neactains, Quay St.

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Rarely is Quay Street so clean, Monday in rain, Neactain’s ticking over with Slow jazz and crosswords, Stout and steaming anoraks.

Leaky Pipes

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I was thinking everything was OK, until one day I woke up and realized that I was living on an entirely different planet, and you seemed like a complete stranger to me. I was feeling so ashamed of these feelings, that I couldn't even tell you about them. I couldn't…

Predator

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Uncounted hens and piglets/ die at my demand. The killing floor// runs red for me. I am/ monstrous to creatures small and great,

Zeus Takes a Day Job

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That's demeaning enough, but not as hard to take as the customers. They're all jaded hipsters, thumb diddling smartphone freaks, pretending their online interactions actually count as relationships and that “tweets” are real conversations. It's sad, reall

Blue Line Southbound

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Brazilian girls yammer with their book bags up against my leg.

55 words #2

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I have always admired flat-chested women.

A Small Life in Slices

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It’s Sunday- no need to shave-/ but shave, I do. A little act// of discipline in the discipline/ of routine.

12 Dreams

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That dog again; enduring love.

Confession

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stole

Take the 40 Million Years Without Sex Challenge!

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Scientists have determined that a tiny freshwater organism known as the "bdelloid rotifer" gave up sex 40 million years ago. And you thought the spark had gone out of your marriage.

Old Haunts

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“Why do you write filth?” they howl

Measures

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Blending in at a rock concert in ballet flats was harder than I thought it would be. The heavy eye makeup and lit cigarette I never brought to my lips put me somewhere between “Trying Too Hard” and “Bless Her Heart.”

Last Visit to the Toy Store

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The two walked around, taking in all the classics: the imported Russian matryoshka dolls of varying styles and bright colors; spinning tops, red Radio Flyer wagons, kaleidoscopes, and wooden yo-yo's invoked memories of Christmases past. The hand-stitched

A World of Possible Flowers

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"There are many dark places;but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater."--J.R.R. Tolkien If the love never came you must have been Dragging your feet. If the hatred carved your…

Missing

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... he led what might be called a quiet life

Small Budget Poems

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Toxins make a body happy/ as if acceleration toward// an end of consciousness/ is its own reward.

Cow

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“He looks funny again,” the twins would say. “Cow looks funny, Mummy.”

Ten Dreams That Raised Some Of the Dead

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Dreams will show you a life that might or might not be yours, but you better believe that they've got to serve when you're asked to come up with a story."--Frank Baron, the night he made bail and left town1. First Blood in Dreams Long Ago The…

Merry-Go-Round

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I thought the Ferris wheel was dumb. All it did was give you a high altitude view of the little Minnesota town where I had grown up.

Just leave it and get out.

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The money stank on the table. Money is dirty she said, one of the dirtiest things. So many people touch it. This pile of brine would not explain its reek, only demanded that we accepted its stench as requisite. It had to have been the cash that stank, prior to its arrival…

Not by Choice but Circumstance

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With small and fleshy hands/ I scratch at enigmatic stones,

Haze

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Just like D-Ray White’s tapping still bounces off the mountains if the right person is listening, Hasil’s hoots and howls are trapped in record wax like a blood-drunk mosquito in amber.

River Run

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yearning amid the waning