Most read stories

Now or Never

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One by one our friends are kicking the bucket. Let's get together. It's now or never, we figure.

Paying for Dinner at a French Restaurant So You Will Love Me

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What does she have / that I don’t have / that I can’t buy / for myself?

Little Women

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The place is buzzing with little women, all clad in black smocks.

Concubine on the Ginza Line

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so I tighten hands with my castaway and say/you failed to impress in your folded peacock dress

Devoured Worship

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This wasn't going to be about her anymore.She tied her strong purple balloon to the neck of the wounded horse. Her skirt and her top felt like armor's breath. The tingle across her scalp felt warm. Small rug scrapes that made her think of her last dog, before she died.This…

Independence Day

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Not long ago, Owen the Second showed her a skull. He kept it in a brown cardboard box in the top of the closet. "My first wife," he said, and sneered, his lip bunching up around a scar just under his nose.

Penny cosmogony

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On his knees he divinates diverging lines with belly laughs he levitates the rebel spheres into geodes .

Cat Tales - a 55 word story

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My spooky cat got out again. Under the deck she ran. Out came the hose that chased her about. Fur spiked, tail pointing, yowling, she hissed at me, and back in the house she pranced. It's been two days now. She slithers out for food after…

Notes on Consulting the 'Owner's Manual for the Human Mind'!

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[CAUTION: TO PREVENT ELECTRIC SHOCK, DO NOT REMOVE COVER. NO USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE. REFER SERVICE TO QUALIFIED SERVICE PERSONNEL.]

What the Bay Broke

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This summer they had reached their fifth anniversary, the landmark they’d dubbed the Bacchanal year. Instead of exchanging gifts made of wood, they’d bought expensive wines and champagnes and emancipated their bodies of clothing for two straight days. The

Life Apart

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Practice has perfected disengagement.

The Yellow Room

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...the knives she laid out on the porch before her husband left her, washed and dried, set neatly by copper pennies.

The Prize

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The fish would need a name, but she didn’t know how to tell if it was a boy or a girl. Did fish have penises?

OUT

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All I wanted was to love her.

bird

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Your mother is a great and dying bird. Once, she tended her grand feathered nest. Once, she preened.

That's all, folks...

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I’m supposed to be writing poems but it’s Saturday morning and I’m watching cartoons.

Driving Lesson

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Just take the mountain curves as tightly to the inside and as fast as surface conditions permit and the road’s edge

BABY MOUSE

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BABY MOUSE She and the baby squeeze into the neon blue star-studded rocket ship in front of K-Mart, a tight fit because the baby's still inside her and the ship is made for under ten year olds and the steering wheel dents her stomach and the baby backs up and…

Off the Map

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It's difficult to remember, much less write down, the hard times you thought were unforgettable when you have a full stomach. It's hard to remember that dirty little room you rented in that house, from a Bosnian landlord, on 27th avenue and Missouri. The…

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.

Low Tide

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Her whole life was lived between high tide and low tide, moments of giggling grandeur and moments of sheer emptiness.

Assiduity Four

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Her clothing style varies from grunge to glamor and . . . she always looks good.

Night and the spell that gave me peace

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When you have lived with pain so long, you grow old and the old man inside of you takes over. That’s just the way it is.

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

Moon Over the Downs - excerpt

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Each drip off the corrugated plastic sheeting made a tinny sound that he could hear from deep within the damp sleeping bag and layers of blankets where he was trying to sleep.

chicken little considers the sky again

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oh, sure i’m still running around like a heads-up/off/prophet/profit/fit trying to cut off my very own de/(con)instruction and all other sordid a•void•able & available/a-Babel towers of post &toastmodern doom/daze

Feets You Fail Me

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San Bruno avenue, six shops in eight blocks. Those Vietnamese ladies thrive on the pedicure trade.

We call them the Removal Men

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They came early and parked up, under cover of the night and the giant oak. I only know this because people told me afterwards. Watching us, they were. It was six o'clock before they smashed their way in, scaring the three of us out of our wits. Baby Billy screamed the place…

Believing Everything I Read In Your Upturned Eyes

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It doesn't have to be force grown betweenus. We entwine naturally. It's agood feeling to have a friend who at oncedoesn't require a hothouse ceiling laidbetween each invisible touch. There's justwind. There's just rain. There's just sun. There's just you.There's just…

The Fereigner

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So, I escaped from the Iron Curtain out of Czechoslovakia, as was called then. That was in 1956 I escaped, and came to Chicago where all of you were for some time already. I know our grandparents came over in early part of century, but my part of family