Most read stories

1968: What I Wanted

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Her smile dazzled me from across the room.

5 Narratives From The Field Museum (Naturally)

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5 Narratives From The Field Museum (Naturally) 1. The American wife asked her French husband why it took him 50 words to ask which pass they would need. He said, “Because it does,” and they argued more, each in their own words. 2. The child…

The mannequins

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I try to enjoy my bookbut the mannequins keep tapping at the windowWhen I look up they vanish Outsidefibreglass clouds are kept in placeby invisible wires——Sometimes the mannequins …

Biz One-Upmanship 101

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"One-upmanship" is a strategy for defeating an opponent somewhat unfairly without actually cheating.

Detienen a 271 conductores en un Stop.

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Un consejo esconde un futuro desastre. Es como si Mar le dijese a Desierto "amigo...impresionante. Dejate elevar por la atracción de Luna y verás". Y Desierto le replicase "está bien, y tú Mar, deja que Viento lleve tus olas hasta el nacimiento de los ríos, es brutal". …

Forerunner

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Morning time had come again. Kojo felt the beginning of the day, but couldn't know it yet. Awareness came first: the temperature of the room, the light behind his eyelids, how much of him could feel a draft. Then, before it was taken from him, he recalled the memory of a…

Every Thing is a Hole in a Thing That It Is Not (A Theoretical Fiction)

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A is a hole in the series of letters, each of which is also a hole in the series of letters.

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…

Tractors

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Beneath their feet bedrock stretched a hundred miles

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.

The Long Walk Home

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The last time Cyrus rode in a train’s passenger car, he came home a dead man.

Must Not Be a Working Bird

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I said, “That bird is hungry.” The sparrow was eying both of us At our separate outside café tables As it hopped around looking for crumbs. Then it would look up at us Expectantly.

Lawn

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white-gray mounds persist

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.

An Account of my Dwelling (for Kamo no Chômei)

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[B]y fleeing the city to live on the outskirts of nowhere—a place so far off the beaten path that even Duras’s aging Mr. Andesmas would have felt isolated—I was of course trying to escape from none other than myself.

The Stars in Illinois

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Only early June, but the heat feels like August. Eleanor and Shelby sit on the front steps of the old Victorian-style house in downtown Los Angeles, drinking homemade margaritas and watching the daylight drain away to dusk. Shelby slaps a mosquito away fr

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.

Fanmail to Ellen Page

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You and I will never meet. You will never even know I existed. Even in dreams you will never imagine me. Someone told me once that your sleeping mind cannot conjure up new faces. It just spits out all the ones you’ve ever seen and that’s it. That’s it.

Playtime

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Her head was free from restraint...

Easy Rider

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She stood there with her back to me and her dress around her ankles.

When technology fails

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But Jeffrey was flabbergasted and couldn’t explain to the officer why he was speeding. All he could manage to get out as an attack of Tourette syndrome hit were nasty, flamboyant obscenities. The Alabama state trooper wasn’t amused.

Subsistence Culture

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Defy the impulse to grow beyond/ your means and the means of the/ place where you lie at night.

Flop-Flip

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Little stuff at first: mistaking their dog for a cat, attempting to start the car with a bar of soap, or using a newspaper to dry the dishes. Lately, he’d been slipping: calling her by his mother’s name during sex, berating his boss for lackluster profit

Sri Radha Afternoons

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We were wild, medieval magpies, sweaty and sweet and selfish; and so much more than we were before I lit that first stick of spice,

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.

Ah, The Drink

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My mother was Irish as Paddy's pig. So all her family. Lovely people they were. Also, seldom seen among the Folk; stone cold sober. My father's family; Bavarian German. Bavaria's the wrong side of the German tracks. Frankfort people laugh at Bavarians as people in…

Elise Imagines Herself Behind Flowers: 1938

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In your mouth is the attic studio Where your father’s brushes lie wet with water

My Own Skin

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Chubby. Plump. Pudgy. Portly. Bulky. Buxom. Rotund. Ample. Hefty. Corpulent. Zaftig.

What I Did For Pho

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Once upon a time there was a Vietnamese restaurant. And then there were two, and four, and eight...

Mockingbird, Mockingbird

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I remember when I first came to California, I heard a mockingbird sitting in a tree, calling out in the names of other birds. It was down in L.A. I was staying at my brother's house in San Gabriel and driving in every day to the campus at UCLA to go to s