Most read stories

The Head

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So I've got this head in a jar and I'm not sure who it belongs to.

Beachcomber's dirge

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...clash of gulls wend upwards, disappearing into grey night's high tide recedes

~with every breath~

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she goes jogging with the feet of an angel the sound of crunching leaves like wrapping paper torn open to reveal an expensive doll and the light in her mother's eyes.

A Break in the Cloud

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Each had jostled and laboured for his or her place upon the blunt outcrop, in the cold persistent darkness, where the outcrop was merely something that had fallen and not quite been washed away.

FWA (Fiction Writers Anonymous)

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Sebastian and Janice had been a natural match. They sought to deny this at first because a recovery assistance program was not a place to forge intimate relationships. It worked out wonderfully in Hollywood, but Hollywood, as everyone knew, was just a facade. So…

Aurora Borealis

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I recalled the one night stand I'd had with the girl one balmy summer night in Minneapolis. We lay on my bed in the moonlight, and I touched the nipples of her tiny breasts with the thumb and pinkie of one hand.

Poem in A Dead Language Only I Understand, Translated for You

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I used to be a poet, you know. / Better, in many respects, than you.

Substitution

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Once there was a man who wrote in code. He was comfortable among substitutions

Prelude to a Love Story

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Slipping into the Sydney Harbour Tunnel like a nocturnal creature fleeing the light, tears stream down my cheeks, spilling from my lips, the pain too great to care about self-preservation. Drunk still, hands clenched, I strain to focus on the world fading into a blur of…

19.

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They made posters and hung them everywhere. With the passing days she became the photograph at its center: hair always in the same ponytail; always with the same smile

Global Arms

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~(+)~

I Wish This Was Fiction

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The convalescent home's common areas are surprisingly well-appointed, given the neighborhood, which makes his actual living quarters that much more dismaying. Poorly lit, dusty, stifling, the room reeks of socks worn for weeks on end. My nostrils burn, and my eyes…

Unexpected Flying Objects

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Meanwhile it was four o'clock in the morning, Pacific time. Seven o'clock eastern. The cat was busy chasing imaginary mice around the hammock—at least Manuel hoped the mice were imaginary. He loaded the next digital images onto the screen. It seemed to

a good ending

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It's twilight

Accepting New Patients

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You've had some truly awful shit pumped into your brains for years at a time now. The practice started a long time ago. It's not always your fault. The only lasting way to get it out of your head is to go and figure out exactly where…

Boston Marathon

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As I walked down to the Subway, I thought to myself that now, after the horror in Boston, everybody looks like a terrorist.

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 34

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—Now that’s a hell-of-a-painting, Frank, he said. Those colors are engaged in warfare. How the hell did you do that?

My Name is Luka

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The first and easiest reason was that he never hit me. Well, if he never hit me, then how could it possibly be abuse? Never mind the threats to stab me in the neck. He was only angry. He really didn't mean that. Never mind he restrained me, or cornered me

Mon in the forest: a fragment

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Mon wakes up surrounded by trees. The light is grey, the trunks black.How long have I slept? he wonders.He doesn't know which way to walk. In every direction, the same prospect of trees. He looks up at a blank sky. No sign even of the sun.***He starts walking. Slowly,…

Heron

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. . . nor did mine eye apologize.

Hollywood Sugar

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No pain is private. How can it be?

Global Arms - 3

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She continued to cooperate with a city council agenda dominated by globalized privatization

Seeing Me

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I got to see me the other day.

Have You Seen Me?

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It’s as she reaches into the fridge for the carton of half-and-half with the grainy waxy photo of the little girl—Last Seen 10/2/06—that the memory surfaces: “Hey. That’s mine.”

Threshold

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He wasn't sure if I was joking.

Ichthyology

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The doctors said, when she was born, that the gills would eventually fade away on their own. Nothing to fear, they said; no more unusual than the rare child born with a tail, or a dense pelt of fur, or a single sharp tooth jutting from its new pink gums.

Those Things

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For me, it was that kind of moment. I got to come back. I had been here before and now, well now, I could come back. I had a chance to do it all again, bigger, better and well, just better. I hoped I could remember all that I learned the first time.

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 9

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Michiko stood in front of Steinway Hall on West 57th Street.

Augustine

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You stretch my heart / in sacred ways

Henny Penny On Why She Crossed the Road

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Ok, ok, people are forever asking me, so why did I cross the frickin’ road? Dumb-shit me, of course. Consequences waaay unforseen.