Most read stories

Picture Window

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You call your wife. “Do you see what I see?” you ask.

Estella

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Everyone loves a story of love unrequited. But what about the stories of the unrequited lovee?

Residual

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Our afterlife depends upon// what interesting shape

Girl With Glasses And Skinny Fingers

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Girl with glasses and skinny fingers playing with wires

Reversal

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For reasons he couldn't fathom, his motorcycle only moved in reverse. He engaged the engine and lurched backward hard. He called a friend, a gear-head with perpetually dirty nails, asked him to look it over.

The Grinder

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"For several days thinking they had found a dead man’s boot beside the highway..."

The Havisham Complex

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Zinvushka Zokolovskaya and I first met at the local botanical garden.

Thanksgiving

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When our kids were very young, my wife and I believed it was important to give our children traditions that they could grow up with. One such tradition that we shared each Thanksgiving was to walk down by the cliffs along the ocean. We'd all go, our kids…

The Kept Man

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If the Titanic rises from the bottom of the sea, I will meet you on deck, in a deck chair. Fully dressed for a change.

My Brain is a Pre-Historic Babe Magnet

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Ug seemed kinda down in the dumps so, uncharacteristically for a male hominid, I asked him why he looked so glum. “Ug no find nice girl,” he said, poking a stick in the dirt.

Meadows

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The whole thing is broken. It's like an egg. I'm not saying this to get you to say something else in the sunny opposite direction of the tattooed scar upon my painted backyard scene. I don't really care. It's only on me. Not on you. I'm glad as…

My Name is William Hurt and I Am a Movie Star

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Not to sound too ridiculous, but Hurt was giving me the hurt, and it felt good.

How Would Jesus Drive?

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Contemporary persecution of Christians takes on milder forms of torture like having to explain away something Pat Robertson said, or constantly having to hear about Fred Phelps picketing funerals because he happens to hate homosexuals.

Want

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I want you closeI want to feel youinside me,softening me untilmy borders are blurredand I'm hardly breathing,my heart swellingso big itbrings me to my knees,I want to know thepain of losing youeach time youclose your eyes andgo to sleep anddream of someone else,I want to…

Flush

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"Nice one, sir," the toilet said.

That Which Does Not Kill You (Only Postpones The Inevitable)

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Harold Smithe awoke that Tuesday morning precisely at 6 am. He did this every day for as long as he could remember. Even on the weekends when his schedule varied. Well, varied slightly. He lay in bed trying to wake up and mulled over the things he needed to accomplish for…

Mississippi

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“I won't live here,” Beth said, waving her hand to indicate the small Southern town in which they were having dinner—the most delicious fried chicken either of them had ever tasted—in a restaurant located in an antebellum mansion. She looked…

My Piper Laurie

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Eddie meets Sarah Packard, a “college girl” played by Piper Laurie. She walks with a limp, a fact Eddie doesn’t notice at first because she’s sitting down at a diner table in a bus station. She’s alcoholic and writes poetry.

Stomping the Big Ozarka Bottle Flat

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I dream of benzene rings/ and polymer shrouds

Quicksand

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At 25...

Chalk, Fish and Monkey

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She picked the fish out of the box leaving a pool of mucus and blood slowly congealing on the shelf and dripped it toward the kitchen table. Outside the wind lashed the tops of the poplar trees together and rain sprayed from the barn roof opposite.

9/11

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He laughs and runs just like the other boys even though he doesn’t have a father now, just his mom.

I Am Speckles the Clown

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Food is silly. Eating is silly. Yet the camaraderie of sharing a table is not silly. It is sacred. It becomes silly when the jello arrives.

Moony Star Moony Star

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a lost children…

Mythologies of Self

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We lie sleepless at night, enraged,/ and finger the keyboard

West Side of the Tracks

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The bus heads west on Route 36, toward the next stop – Howell, New Jersey. After driving ten minutes, and after crossing the tracks, the bus gets a flat.

Hide & Seek

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I have never seen doubt on the face of a Roman general,' he said, ‘but when you looked at me and said “I know”…that was a certainty I'd never encontered. You have crossed the Acheron twice.'

Hobby Lobby

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In human rights, a man and a woman may marry and bring forth a family. It is a civil right in the U.S. but not a human right (as far as I know) to raise a child singly without the knowledge of the other parent.

Divorcing Delia

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I held her hand through two divorces, I warned her that gorgeous Geoffrey was homosexual when she was oblivious, and I fed her children when she was off at rehab (four times before it 'took').

Birth of a Tiger

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He was instantly on her, pulling at her nightgown