Most read stories

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.

Personal Hell - I'm Not Scared, Just Disappointed

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Satan is a wide-eyed Pollyanna mime who communicates with a ventriloquist dummy that corrects my grammar, speaks in internet acronyms, tells me that I’d be a lot prettier if I just smiled more and lost fifteen pounds, and nags me about how all my problems

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.

Rio, 1946

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Now his daughter was an American citizen and Max wanted only the chance to board the SS Maua and disembark in New York.

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.

The Edge of the World

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I am far from home, wherever that is.

I Ain't Your Kissin' Cousin - song

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I ain’t your kissing cousin That’s pretty plain to see Baby, keep your pretty lips Far away from me I ain’t your kissing cousin That’s pretty plain to see You’re really very pretty Come kiss me and we’ll see We don’t live in a barnyard

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.

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.

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…

The First Snowfall

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the smell of the small cedar chips burning in the fireplace

Gothic Clockwork Apparatus Man

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

"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....

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...

Four Stories I Cannot Write

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“Per­haps instead of a book I could write lists of words, in alpha­bet­ical order, an ava­lanche of isol­ated words which expresses the truth I still do not know” — Italo Calvino albu­men before child grit secretlyshame august blood …

Glory Hobble

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I was to limp with stunned, growing horror, as I navigated through the swirling smoke and maze of human corpses...

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.

that's what sea said

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i thirst always for that poetic mouthful