Most read stories

Sayōnara

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He painted a woman on them, identical to the woman that kneeled by his bed.

The Dog's Familiar

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The county sent two crews, one to get Mr. Meyers, the old shut-in, tall and affable, but quiet and bent, like a crooked coat rack with a porkpie atop, the other for his dog, an english setter whom he shadowed like a familiar. I say he was the familiar and

The Finding Smile

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My mother gave her all to convince him to be a politician. My sister begged on bleeding knees for him to give her head. I just needed somebody to help me find things.

Things Get Fuzzy

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We can’t just bomb Berlin or Dresden,/ Nagasaki or Hanoi, to make things safe

The Ice Scraper Symphony

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Stay tuned for my next short - Candle Smoke Wishes - COMING SOON ON A MONITOR NEAR YOU!!

Mercury

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At 11 pm, it is 87 degrees and I sit in front of the air conditioner, eating oatmeal. The oats aren't soft enough, but it is sugary and fills me. Outside, the city hovers at the edge of a brown out, people sweating hopelessly inside small boxes. In Utah, it was cold…

Forbidden Music

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There are songs I know to not listen to when I am alone.

Esmeralda

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Being an uncredited bonus composition, written in the sublimest access of divine afflatus this poet believes his lyric verse has ever known. “In olden times, dark was not counted fair”: Those were the words, I think, of some old poet. …

Betrayal

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My brother Herb married his high school sweetheart right after completing college. This was a girl named Beryl, whom he'd met originally in Mr. Reinert's marching band at York High School in Elmhurst. I remember one day in particular in the middle of the

Fulton Flapper

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The Italian was late. She was supposed to come into the store, meet him in the back, and arrange to take the last of his liquor.

Memoir 2.4

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He invited her in for a Martini and she graciously accepted.

The Exhaustion of Dreams

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I like it best when I wake up And the wild rain of dreaming ends.

Spoke

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Laurel's new bike is powder blue, with silver tassels on the handle bars. Jenny's mouth actually waters at the sight of it, as though it were a fresh loaf of bread or a perfect, juicy orange. “You can ride it if you want,” Laurel…

More Of My Dark Job History

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In my 14 to 15 year old life in the late 50s I worked as a clean-up boy in the neighborhood butcher shop up on 5th. Ave.,

This Time

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This time the mountain climber does not attain the summit.

Eve in the House of Mirrors: 13 fragments

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1. On the morning of her eighteenth birthday, Eve woke to find herself transformed into a gigantic chess piece made of zeros and ones.2. Eve gazed so long at her smartphone that she found herself falling into it.3. She fell for a time that may have been short or long or…

In Real Time

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We are the same shits/ we were in the Bronze Age

The Sentence

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Two women are escorted to the desert, where they are shackled to the ground. Who are they, what have the done, and will they survive?

Dumb Luck and the Fall of Empires

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At some point we all reach the end point/ of something. Something important/ if only to our fragile self esteem.

One Kiss

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"It was one kiss. No tongue. What does that even mean?" Lindley tried to see Leah as any other patient, "What do you want it to mean?" "I don't know," Leah whined, tears welling, "something, maybe. You know I hate surprises." Her sister was not another…

Separation

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The increasingly furrowed lines on his forehead made her stomach clench.

Skin and Bones

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She lay there, skin and bones, unable to speak. Little did we know those were our last moments togethter. How cruel for her, to want to share a lifetime of thoughts and feelings in those waning moments only to be robbed of the chance. My brother and I…

Apex

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You left paint and blood smeared on the wall.

Ineluctable

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I attended the burial of our affair when I found the notebook-maybe it should be called her diary-she had foolishly forgotten, leaving it on the deck of my beach house where she stayed while I was on that short trip to Chicago and I was numbed at first, unsure how to…

Please Help Support My Attempts at Being Funny

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You can tell your doctor the truth Even if no one else will stop and listen He or she may have a balm for it To help make it go away Or at least go into remission Remission is the staging area for Lies Corporate and otherwise We don’t have

Un Americano

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His eyes are wide then narrow and brown. Hers are gray then they look away, toward the back door where a delivery driver has walked in, carrying a tray. Nothing is going to happen today.

Houses Are Havens and the Outside Plans Your Destruction

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The first of the fires that started by the river in the abandoned mills were so hot they burned white and pale blue

Rock and Sushi

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If I remember him at all it’s because I decided not to flunk him so he could graduate. I had this theory that teachers should be bound by the same oath as doctors, First, do no harm.

In Knucklebones, This Is What We Keep

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Outreach the ostrich

Mean Time

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between