Most read stories

Mosaic

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MOSAIC Your eyes coal-rimmed, busted, burned by betrayal. You and I, knee to knuckle, skinny with disorders and blurred around our edges. Challenged by our experience and the ash of past-love dusting the grate, the state, the…

Estella

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

Mountains

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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…

A Little Load of Paint

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Cézanne sags during a moment of paint. There is an umbrella in the room whose surface collects his thoughts. Outside, in the rain, the grass and garden smell strongly of spring. Fruit litters the table. Light through the window writhes in conversation with shape and…

Five Million Yen: Chapter 9

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Naked Lady? I know that from somewhere. Then he remembered. That's what they called those old 1930's and 40's Conn saxophones, Naked Ladies. How would Smith know that?

Assiduity Six

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"Every generation is a new generation, isn't it? What's so different about your generation?"

Bloodsport

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At last one of the men on the line bowed his head in a silent prayer for deliverance from what was about to come, then lifted his head and shouted loudly for his fellows to charge.

Queen

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Normally, Aidan looked like a guy. A highly feminine guy, but still a guy. He wore his hair in a buzz cut (a turn on of mine), wore tight clothes, worked out so he had a bit of muscle, but nothing over the top. And he was my guy.

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.

What I Am

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I am a happy cog

WARNING: I Brake for Plastic Shopping Bags

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"...innocent butterflies of pollution trapped and entangled,"

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.

Six Ways to Say Butterfly

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He repeated these six words like a prayer. His only confession.

Moony Star Moony Star

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a lost children…

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.

Picture Window

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

Valhalla After Dark

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In traffic I cry bloody murder, but my bloodlust subsides once I'm in Valhalla. Chip Whitehead wants to see me on the 22nd floor before I start my shift. Charlie and the other suits have been looking at me funny since I sent Chip a memo suggesting the recession…

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.

Illustrated Comments on the Apophatapataphysical Metrics of Cosmic Humor

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(the vast preponderance of dark matter and dark energy discernible in these latter days begins to suggest just how dark the humor of existence is) . . .

Gerontophile: An Imposition

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His shirt, striped, fuzzy, is of fabric like velour and wreaks havoc with sunlight. His seat faces the aisle, I am sitting forward-faced across the aisle, we are on a half-full city bus, this afternoon.It is a funny shirt so I smile. I am not smiling because of…

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.

Larry's "Gonna Die" Parrtayye

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When we started plans for the party, none of us wanted Larry to die, most of all Larry himself. Actually, when we first started plans for the party, Larry wasn’t dying.

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.

Grunion Fishing

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As spilled on a sandy Corona del Mar beach/both in moonlight and starlight so lovely/and strangely sad as if receding still

Advice For Aspiring Writers

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Published writers will tell you that the most important thing you can do as a beginning writer is to know your markets! So this month, we'll talk about two of the markets open to you and your riveting but as yet unpublished prose -- Fling Magazine and Clubhouse…

Travis & Jared

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“Now I see clearly my whole life is pointed in one direction — there never has been any choice for me (Travis Bickle, "Taxi Driver").

Two Different Worlds

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The boy was sure of something,She was just the one. The girl was sure of nothing, Her life had just begun. For him, he'd found his partner, There was never any doubt. For her, he was fine for now, But there was more to learn about. He thought it was a perfect…

The Shadow People

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Two summers later, the ritual began. Carol left her house at midnight, having served her husband and daughter a heavy dinner that left them caged in their sleep. She was like a thief working in reverse: she rose from bed with her husband’s first snore,