Most read stories

even dead body

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I'm a jogger of these parts, but I've yet to discover a dead body, or even dead body parts, or worse yet, discover that my parts will be discovered by some unfortunate jogger.

Uncle Harlequin

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My Aunt's husband liked to dress up like a clown

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 24

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When Frank entered Michiko’s apartment, Michiko was not there.

The Creative Use of Meal Time

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We’re more into the punishment that works its way in through the skin and coats the heart anonymously.

T.S. Eliot On His Deathbed

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I guess at the end you’re only looking forward. Or upward actually, since you can only lie there on your back looking upward, straight ahead toward infinity, your mouth in a grimace, with the ghostly pink lips peeled back from the teeth.

Freelance Your Way to Poverty

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Buyers of freelance writing have a well-deserved reputation for responding slowly, thereby increasing your pleasure in much the same way that the Pointer Sisters longed for a slow hand.

Intro to Philosophy

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We now live in post-Postmodern Absurdist fear of course, says our smiling Prof. That’s the price we pay he tells us. . . .

Rising

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The coin, so little, the watch chain, the youth, the fading softening speech, each hand and finger, the panic modeled on your own eyes, the ashtray, certain stumps along the way, the long distance, the odd feather, the jazz rope gone,…

My 27th Great-Grandparents

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Early Spring, 1075, Northumbria: Judith, too ashamed to speak, too angry to cry, waves her handmaiden away. She wants no food. Wind drives icy rain across the thickness of…

Kate

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It’s that laugh of hers that gets me...

The Old Dog (in response to Brian Warfield)

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Blend the dog a drink and sit down beside him and draw straws for regrets.

The Four Despairs of Lumpy

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children love to push the gas up and down my limbs

War Then

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They were just boys, the Nazis I mean, young in their twenties, not much older than my brother Cyril.

Alternate Tale

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Suppose Eve, strolling through the sunlit Garden, had not stumbled on that particular Tree at all, the wily serpent twined in its lower branches?

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 21

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Francesco needed a magnifying glass to read her little missives.

Rob's Send-off

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They could cram Rob inside the trunk and then drop him somewhere in the dingles.

Mr. Wazzeldot

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Mr. Wazzeldot has seven legs. He lives very comfortably. He likes to sit by the fire. There's a large cushion for a chair, and in the evenings, he sips his Bloody Marys. I know because I visit him…

disparate haiku (mostly)

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faith in gravity/permitted them to extol/the guillotine's blade.

Anonymous Hackers

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A university student who triggers a flash mob in the heart of Silicon Valley to prove her hacking creds finds herself in deep trouble when the colorful members of Anonymous Hackers prove their hacking creds to her.

Ghosts

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I see ghosts. They accost me in their sleep. Hundreds of them. When I wake up (after a long night of half-waking), I think, What wold ghosts want with me? I have nothing for them. But at night they're there again, watching, tapping my shoulder as I lay awake. Sometime…

Unconscious Primate Pandemic Panic

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I wrap my left foot

The Eleventh Brother, After the Swan

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I turned a maiden to a witch / and back again

On the Roof

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Marie was on the roof. The deck, with its cool concrete pavers and faded cedar Adirondack chairs, was one of the reasons she and Harold had bought their condo in this building. The only ugly part of the roof was the chain-link fence along its edge; soon after they moved…

The Ice Cream Mantra

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Chant the ice cream mantra. Prance the do dah day ballet. Trot the t-bone tango two-step. Dance the livelong day away.

Mother O'Grady's Last

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Christmas night was closing in at the Cantrips alehouse in Aberdeen, a firm favourite for riggers and other men and women who lived life close to the horizon. Sometimes, on a Saturday night, things might get a bit rowdy but Mother O'Grady would stand firm and bring out…

A Scalar Boson a Day

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. . . the empiricism of the mechanical had wound tight into her, lessons her few calendars could never impart without aid from sundials, hourglasses, clocks.

The River of the Parched Spirit

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anxiety said Kierkegaard is the dizziness of freedom

Untitled

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I assume the shape of a pronoun.

O Where Did Our Funny Go?

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What a nation! First we lost our money Now we’ve lost our funny

The Code of Hammurabi

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We pull up chairs. I breathe in her Bath and Body Works vanilla, read her paper slowly and aloud because the ears catch what the eyes miss. Her sentences are awkward, stilted.