Most read stories

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.

11

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eleven o'clock spills despair all over our bedspread

My Coyote

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I say her- it might be him-/ but from a distance I supply the details I prefer.

A Bitter And Unseasoned Business Attorney Makes His Case That "Crazy Heart" Is The Perfectly Nasty Ending

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In closing, Your Honor:After the interview Bad Blake, a/k/a "Otis" takes "Miss" Jane Craddock back to his hotel, ties her up, and gives her a Cleveland Steamer. For reference, please refer to my Brief, Exhibit A, showing a thespian named Ronald Jeremy…

The Mermaid's Revenge

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Lapping salt beads from/ my crackling, ecstatic lips.

Feb 8

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Call it a spell or a prayer or a ritual; it worked.

The Thousandth Day

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She pictured the President leaving the hospital a few days later, hobbling on a cane. Jackie beside him, Caroline and John-John dashing from a waiting limousine. He couldn’t die. She’d looked into his eyes. John F. Kennedy spoke to her.

Faith

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... black holes suck in matter and supernovas explode.

All Kind of Ruin

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They broke both of Jimmy's shins. / Gambling debt just like in the movies

The Ann chapter

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The way I felt was as though you were, every day, making the conscious and deliberate decision not to be with me, not to share your life with me—and not to share my life, that you were choosing not someone else, but something else.

The First Snowfall

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the smell of the small cedar chips burning in the fireplace

Pre-determination

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She never saw me pull the wings off live flies or throw wood lice in the fire just to see them shrivel, drown a beetle in a stream of warm pee.

"A Death by the Sea" (excerpt)

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Then a flicker caught my eye. To the left of the balcony, where the residential high-rise abutted a commercial building to its right, a shape--half-dark, half-lit--stood on a limestone ledge.

A Certain Distance

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...a headwater stream that has never had a name....

Lawnmower Season

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"this is the year I'm going to plant a yucca tree in the garden."

Lips unsealed

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They had a vague idea of how lips were to be used. Lips that parted feverishly, lips that burned. Lips - old, but still amateur. It was no wonder, considering that 'boys from good families' would never dream of even looking at a woman, let alone kiss her!

Prurient

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I like him. I really, really like him in a way that I don’t like guys, not anymore, not after all the dirty lies into get in my pants, the dirtier lies to get out of them later, the indignities and the humiliations and the disappointments.

Tough Love

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If they don’t cover consequences in your gifted and talented program, you may care to research it.

Through The Glass Dimly

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Odd bookends stuck in familiar territory, we have become lethargic

The Serious Writer’s Obituary

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...was discovered today hanging from a shower outlet in his bathroom...

Buzz Kill

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Blood had soaked through his Converse All-Stars, and into his cotton sox. It was the smell of metal, of iron more specifically, that nudged his mind out from the fog of shock and denial, closer to the reality of his circumstances.

Instinct

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They coo and gurgle in the warmth of twig and down. They are so delicate, hard to look at without thinking of death. I tell them I want for them chief among all things strength, speed, resilience.

Robert hires a lawyer

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His lawyer, with looming, supermodel good looks, had a mild case of Tourette's. She would be talking to you and then there would be a little tic and her head would bob slightly to the left, and her eyes would go a little blank, and then this very strange

Older Now

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You will never know how much it hurts When someone else touches your face. But I also know how much you count on others To pull the slivers out of your heart.

Our Sister's Boyfriend

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-for Franz, the least understood comedian of all We all knew that Marissa's college boyfriend was ugly — there was the way she answered our mother's pestering "Is he cute?" with a stalling "Um, well..." and then there was the fact that she hadn't posted any photos…

A note from Liu Xiabo

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I think about the weight of those words—how they are silenced by the weight of stone, by the weight of 11 years in a Jinzhou prison cell,

Gothic Clockwork Apparatus Man

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an awkward stage between glued popsicle stick marsupial, and mechanical tin foil mammal.

The Underlying Order

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“Choices overwhelmed us,” Thomas continued, years later, “like waves crashing.”

Something Horrible Has Happened

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The smart drivers know the signs/ and the back street ways around the wreck.

Turkey Day

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Over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house they went, Will and his new girlfriend Emma from Atlanta for the annual family dinner and drunken disaster in Allendale.