Most read stories

Induce Me

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Life's a beach? A bitch? Same thing.

Cleaning The Dead

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"Don't pull too hard," warned Father. "You might sever it from the body, spraying blood into your eyes."

Billing Notice

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Due to recent enhancements to our billing system, the rate per unit for your basic service can no longer be determined.

Somebody Loves You

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When I look at the picture on my refrigerator, I always think the same thing: "Hitler was a baby once too, look how well he turned out."

Toothed and Thorny

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Cliffs are not all I've known, but I've seen them every day since I came to light. When I first broke out of the shell that protected me from feet and poisons, I pushed my way into darkness. It was soil. I could not have survived if it was light, and when I surfaced there…

The Stranger

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“I can't go to sleep,” Jonathan said, laying on the doctor's couch. He counted on his fingers to keep his mind active. “I'll certainly die if I do.”

Monsters Happen

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Dee startled awake from the dream, sat up in bed and looked around the room. The dream came back--hazy, yet clearer by the second. Dee had been warning the girl in her dream that he was a monster; that she shouldn't talk to him, should stay far away from him. …

The Gravediggers

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The night before we dug John Clark's grave, my brother and I stood outside his windows and got an eyeful. Rose, his wife, should have closed the blinds. There she was in the arms of Willard, her neighbor, middle school science teacher. It was a serious…

Freedom

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the darkness held frieghtened by the surveillance of a distant white shimmer.

The Magic Trumpet

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I gave my trumpet case to a girl named Sophie; she liked the velvet inside.She still played with dolls;they would live there,in the dark away from the world.Safe. I was a terrible trumpeter;i missed the high notes in band, squawked like a chicken.I strapped the trumpeton my…

Woman at the Bar

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I saw a woman / at the bar tonight

The Number Nine and The One After That

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Johnny K. didn't much like taking his exotic drugs any more. He now thought that the common reality was already an intense enough trip without wrapping it all up in enough gauze to cause permanent daydreams to the head. He liked his cheap hamburgers…

Fire In The Heart

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The woman leapt from the top of the burning building. The flames reddened the faces of the watching crowd. The heat pushed them back. The woman hit the ground. The crowd oooooed. If only I'd been a firewoman, I thought, with a ladder as tall as a building and a…

My Bunny Hop Years

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The Bunny Hop represented that riot-like atmosphere–in cuddly guise–described by Claude Levi-Strauss in his seminal essay that I have forgotten the name of it’s so important.

small pleasures

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sheets, white, coarse redolent with Clorox

Character & Fitness

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Character & Fitness, the opening chapter to my novel, "Death of the Dying City."

3 Poems and a Seething Pen

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it’s more about how all those words look around each other. he’s more interested in the shape of things, than the reality....

Pavane

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The shadows hang fast on the downs this day: And I hang like the darkness, over heath and down; Since the air there is clearer than the clouds, men say, And I'm lost in the country, I shall turn to town. If the heather is restless, then the fete is …

The Birds

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It had been over three months since he’d left his home and started to walk. He’d kept a journal to begin with, but his book soon ran out of batteries. It was that sort of thing that had irked Neil at the start, but now he’d just let it slide down his back

Hammer Had

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They say I'm supposed to see everything as a nail, but I have a silver head. Too soft for bang-bang. Too soft for anything but sitting on a shelf. I sat in her classroom for twenty-five years. She was proud of me and pointed often to the words inscribed on me that I can't…

Grandfather Clock

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On a cold November afternoon I stood in the foyer of Sampson and Sons funeral home and paced silently back and forth across the purple carpet. They have that deep pile and rich color of carpeting that you only really see in a small town…

As Faulkner's Birthday Nears, Mailmen Ask "What If?"

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Before he became famous Faulkner was postmaster at the University of Mississippi Substation Post Office, a fact that endears him to mailmen around the world.

On the Anniversary of My Grandfather's Passing

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What I remember about my grandfather were his fart jokes. When he wasn't telling us kids about how young David defeated the mighty Goliath or how Saul the pharisee humbled himself to become Paul the Apostle, he was telling us about the baby burp that begg

Face to Face

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The face had become a chilling death mask.

Taking it Easy

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At the Winslow Funeral Home in Winslow, Arizona, just like in the Eagles’ 70s song “Take It Easy,” only I’m not taking it easy.

Braque's Diary of the Atelier Cut-Outs

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Today, the buxom neighbor carrying blintzes Egged me not to care about What’s not flat. She forgot To bend, clanging together Some fronts and sides.

Conjecture

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Sunday, May 9, 1773 Sir — The world must at present be perpetual on the primitive state of human nature Conjecture The jealousy and envy boils over a dead weight strangled serpents in the Temple

Inner City

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This time he was dressed in a snap-brimmed hat, zoot suit with a gold chain and two-toned shoes; something out of a sad, lost Los Angeles past. I had no choice but to follow him as he walked down stairs that led to the Metro. We stood near one another,…

The memories lived in the house

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each act of creation is a jolt of expectation

Endless

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Endless. I find this story.Beginning. To walk.Repeating. Repeating.The Memory. Of snow.Amsterdam. Rivers narrow.Hearts. Divide.Hands. Emboldened.Patronizing. Unpatriotic.Semblance. House held open.Forging. The ties…