Most read stories

Windfall

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It turned out Eel’s brain corrects for imbalance, and he can only feel danger for a moment or two.

Profiling Robert Allen Zimmerman

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Since when has it become a crime to walk about a neighbourhood? No one will ever convince me that it 's okay to follow, harass, or approach any unarmed person with a gun and shoot them.

Reconstruction

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My favorite lie is that he'd escaped the South Tower before it collapsed. Smoke inhalation erased his way home. Mine's better than mother's version: a stranger hurled herself onto him. The truth is when they stopped search and rescue, mother told father, Go. Even dead, his…

Hara-kiri

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unwrapping the gauze from her wrists....

A Life Lived In Outline

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He began life as we all do, an almost indeterminate blob. Ultrasound sonar plotting his outline on screen. The echo chambers of his beating heart dispelling the ectoplasmic impression of mere ghostly existence. His rudimentary …

Facsimile in Boots

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There she is. A paper doll of me. The dress, the lilt, the self-hatred. The crowd thins and swells in want of a scene. Conversations begin, pretend, then halt. My gin and tonic sweats into my hand and I lick at the…

Turning Thirty

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Of all the authors in the library, it was a wife from Maryland who called out from her marriage dormer I was not to read her.

Fumes

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He was choking on the fumes.

Sounds like leaving

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chains across all the old doors

the true bliss of objects is entropy

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What the tumbler meant

How It Went Bad With Horsepen

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You should never have believed your daddy when he said a man with half a dog was better off than a man with no dog at all.

Waitress Hopping

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Or, today, when early summer sweated the long pants off every woman under the age of thirty. Did I notice the way you looked at them for one, two, three seconds; then didn't, partial to short-shorts. It was sly how you kept them in your line of sight, alm

Beach Busker

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I fondly remember those warm, weekend evenings at twilight on the beach. After the frolic of the waves flattened, sending the surfers home and, after the last bait was spent, sending the surfcasters away, I'd set up the little, foldable, 3‘x4', rectangular stage I always…

Salinger Pays Caulfield a Visit

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Out in the world again, pretending to belong.

The Misfortune 500

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When I first started out in my working career, I made it the habit of obtaining jobs with companies that were about to go under. (I wrote more books while on unemployment than by any other method.) I was a real bloodhound at sniffing out the pre-dawn od

Seascape

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1. Walking here with you on these narrow strands of clean air & imagination

Great Rift Valley

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she shivered in the ceasefire like a virginal nude brought to life.

The 5 Senses of the Apocalypse

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The Rapture comes and goes unannounced in carbonated soda bubbles spicing the air.

What If?

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“Can you adopt if you work for the circus?” I asked her

Bitter Tide

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I loved without marriage and the men loved without divorce and we loved a twenty-four-year-old eating and how gracious she shone over a tame bottle of beer.

The Road

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My mother moved her things out of my parents’ bedroom into the attic guest room. When I asked where guests would sleep, my father said, “Matthew, don’t be an asshole.”

Doppio Macchiato

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Sulawesi-Kalosi brews bitter and watery without proper care.

Ode To My Hangover

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you utter fucker.

The Judge's Wife Part 10

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The Judge waited for the perfect wave.

Drop Water

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slather consciousness

Sleeping on Route 110

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in the deep dark of a 2 a.m. atmosphere

Girlfriend

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As a rule, she calls me whenever she’s waiting for her train or bus. ‘Hiya… How’s life-’ she starts off sweetly. Even though I should know better by now, I can only respond in the same old way. I’ll say: ‘Hi Kate!’. Next, I’ll try to te

Things to Do while Waiting for the Toaster

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For you have waited. And waited and waited. And soon your slice of bread will be ready.

Mr. Kunitz, Mr. Lowell, Mrs. Craig

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Although I think we can easily work it out because we are not here in the Yale graduate school, and diction is the theme of the story. Diction is a choice in language.

Mob

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He is leaning back against a pillar watching the dancing; a spectator to joy – both planned and spontaneous – that’s unfolding in bodies fourteen and fifteen years old in front of him.