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Because

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He spoke the "Why" and it stuck out its tail. He tripped and fell with his face wedged between the W. She kept the answer in her chest so the words wouldn't crowd him where he lay. The "Why" found its way back into his cheeks and puffed his face out like a disease. He…

Playing Boggle with Lowell's Mind

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lewd sinew swine

The Bird Nests of Lascaux

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With their brightly-colored bits of found string woven into the walls of their nests to teach their baby birds what the worms of the future will look like. Somewhat like the cave paintings of Lascaux for early man in France, when hunti

~switches and shade~

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  mis-placed       the change           she goes looking for.        her folks        missed another hour...          her worth-while spent wasting        the voice wouldn’t leave the leaves alone.

Water Hitting Water.

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Jenny was certain nobody saw her when she took the slinky shirt from her father's store. It was blue with buttons shaped like cherries, the fabric light as air. She balled it up in her hand. Her father owned a chain of boutiques called Body Electric. The racks were…

The Eyes of the Inmate

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The courts had scheduled the date long ago but the time, an hour always left to the warden, had yet to be decided.

It is Midnight

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It is midnight in Utah, but I can’t tell. It always looks like midnight in a cave.

on the shore on the shore

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I await, here at Sandymount Strand / There's a stony bed and moistened sand / Couples dance away into futurity / With their dogs upon the shore

Dreams Should Come with Buttered Popcorn

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the brain plays impish tricks/ and entertains itself with avant garde/ home movies

Harv & Julianne

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Harv and Julianne He has woken here now, on this bed, and on this particular day, many times. His fifth year in the cabin, his fifth December in Helen, his fifth, he is sure, of many…

Ten Books That Have Stuck with Me Off the Top of My Head as I Make Them Up, #2

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#2 The Typewriter Inside You by Harmon Gentle—I found this one at a garage sale when I was 15. Intended as a manual for sharpening one's typing skills, by the third chapter it became obvious that Mr. Gentle's sanity had slipped, and that rather than mastering the…

Winsome Mshindi

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The cold and the ice’ve really stoked a fire in those old bones of his. He runs with the gait of a racer, front legs straight out—each extension producing a crack like Jack London spitting into the cold...

The Fetishist

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Sex is a fetish war -- a battle of trinkets of desire

How To Find A Galaxy In The Dark

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I don't know what I'd expected from the week of mourning after my mother died but I sure hadn't pictured this marathon cocktail party. Our house is packed with people, food, booze and borrowed chairs. People I haven't seen in years keep turning up with casseroles.I'm…

What's that on your glasses?

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The shit just doesn't want to come off.

Secrets of Philadelphia

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Bruce Springsteen begins singing from the loud speaker he was bruised and battered and couldn’t tell what he felt.

Santa

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Santa’s ruddy snoze/

To an Overly Helpful Husband of Advanced Age

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in which a man who is bored with years of retirement poses a threat to himself and others

the total compiler

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The idea of an infinite textual universe occurs in many places in the works of Jorge Luis Borges. The contexts and permutations of language, which others had held to be perhaps infinite (allowing themselves to use such an imprecise term), that…

Storms

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Sirens wake me, screaming warnings in the dark.

The Monday Wednesday Friday War

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Ginny, the mother, was a lark in every respect of the word. Born and raised in central California farm country, to a family of lower middle class means, educated in public schools in whose bathroom stalls she was deflowered as unceremoniously as a pig ta

A Serial Killer’s First Day in Medical School

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To rival the professor in his knowledge of various body parts is impossible ...

Comic Superhero

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Andrew had learned the art of being a chameleon at school where his school uniform provided an exoskeleton. Beneath was no costume, just the fragile skin of adolescent ego.

Arcana Magi Pure Vol.5 - c.3

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It was unusual, a feeling of déjà vu waft in the air. However, this was completely new to them. Mayumi gripped her shoulders as Emi’s lips moved trying to ease her fear. Mayumi did not understand what this stuff was.

Bad Monkey

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The hotel sits on the highest point in Shimla: a place of cedar-scented air, an aggressive monkey population, and summer houses left by the British Raj.

Across US Sullen Teens Dump Family for Olive Garden

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"That zit on your forehead just won't go away, will it, sweetie?" she adds as she brushes her daughter's bangs downward.

Accident Assurance

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They found your athymic neck/clipped like a bag of Skittles/and your lifeblood left a Rorschach test on the dash/in which they saw the future/and their own exits/(straight ahead and to the right).

Substitution

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

Assiduity Fourteen

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Don reports everything to Uzma and Rasheed, I'm aware of that. It doesn't bother me. I'm not hiding anything from them or anyone else.

Metamorphosis Revisited

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When I met Gregor Samsa he was still a cockroach, erratic and skittish whenever the light came on. We often spoke in the dark. I empathized with the man. I mean bug. Ok. That isn't fair. You can't call a man a bug because he chirps and eats dried skin cells. A…