Most read stories

The Rising Tide

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I'm just a rental dog myself looking for the guardian of starlight peeing on the expired parking meters and barking up all the wrong trees.

Landing

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She’s witnessed her mother’s terror on the day of the hurricane, and she demanded for the first time in her life that her mother do something her mother did not want to do.

John Ruskin doing a Swan Dive

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She used her right breast. Lifted it to her chin, aimed at the can, and shoved it down as hard as she could.

Nothing to laugh at, at all.

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The house had to be clean - I mean thorough-clean - when he got home from the pit for his tea, or he’d throw his plate at the wall and the gravy would run down onto the carpet. There was always gravy.

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.

bird

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

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…

Waiting for the Voice on the Line

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hoping for a happy outcome/ like a kindly voice on the line

Home Health Care

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But what if it grew into a nasty tea party-ish bimbo right winger -- a little Michelle Bachmann nubbin?

Liquid Sunset

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After work and wine, I Take some red food coloring and empty it Into my bath water. I submerge myself and open my eyes Like looking backwards at the world through A liquid sunset. I push myself under water, squeaking Feet…

Pretending Veracity, History Winks

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Mosaics are a trick of the eye, seeming

The French Revolution

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Judith was a bed wetter. Judith was a first-year college student and she was embarrassed that she wet the bed.

Stillness

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You were sitting on dark leather meringue, wearing slit ivy, epilated thighs sliding through, roots showing beneath your anaemic skin, fighting with the pale bluegreen of your veins. Quills extended from your left hand, bent about 10.2 degrees or so.

Indulgence

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I crave the confines of the convent

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 5

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When the cab dropped Frank at his address at seven that evening, he noticed the lights were on in Michiko’s apartment.

Godfrey part 2: Marjory's bag

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"when I say bag, what I mean to say is…"

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.

Gold Digger

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Sophie hoped that Ryan would just stay in the bathroom and never come out. Her stomach turned just thinking about him, but wealthy nerds were easier to work than wealthy regular guys. No self-esteem, no experience with women…no problem.

Dessert Buffet

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“Your husband is an asshole, isn’t he?” he asks.

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

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.

Confederates

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I knew I spoke out of turn when I asked my father's old friend Charlie Jobe what he thought would come of moving to the veterans' camp, or "Village of the Deranged", as the newspaper has since taken to calling it. That was their description after all the

Please Don't Pass The Salt

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The only silver lining? The man in my life and I are in this together.

Birdhouses

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That year, if you asked Al, was truly the best of times, the worst of times.

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

Light Eyes

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Once, when he had been married for a year, she sent him a card which said, "If you have seen a cat smoke a pipe, you have got it made." There was an illustration of a big, black panther, standing up on its hind legs, smoking what looked like a big tub of

blanck (1?)

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① / empty space / not black / not white / not noise / blanck

TWO STEPS

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It turns out I know a thing or two about momentum. I know, I know. Like the crescendo of your bicycle wheels. Like the force the florist put on the stems the day Linda died. The way my fingers spin between planetary mass. This is how I know I’m not real

Texas Weather

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I know this: the sky is vast here// and the sun unforgiving/ to any architecture not the best

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…