Most read stories

December 1999

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... and you can’t balance your checkbook or divide a three-way bill in a restaurant but you can still recite all the sixteen ways of SHAUN CASSIDY TELLS: 16 WAYS TO TURN ME ON!

The Imprint of Necessity

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I’ll tell you what I think, I think Their hopes of a brush with love Is what keeps the simple cricket Awake all night If you find a baby cricket on its back Fallen on the sidewalk Struggling with its legs In the air Help it to its fee

Couple Busting

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you had to actually cross a damn street, vacate your brain, and say, "you two hellions are going to combust from all this torrid public defilement."

Polyester Purgatory

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They line the bar beside me. Talking about themselves and estranged children, while rubbing necks and wrists, searching for the pulse.

A Young Girl's Passage

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"There's a dead mouse in the toilet!"

The Hamburger Story

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I didn’t like her. I like the name. You know I hate that name. I always thought you were funny. Maybe even more than you were mean.

Arabic

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I would see her at the gym in the mornings.

Flossie’s Bordello and Bar-B-Q Shack

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The women of Bixby, Texas, united in their frustration and general thirst for arson, cheered as Flossie’s Bordello and Bar-B-Q Shack burned to the ground.

Aphrodite in Ruins

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He needed an editor for his Yale dissertation, the shifting borders between criminal justice and the internet. But the sex was inevitable. He was six two. I was blonde. I don’t think we liked each other very much, but that wasn’t important.

Circularity (Act 1)

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Ian Markham stood before the massive triangular window of Circularity's pyramidal office building. Its Technicolor hologram, a coup in advertising sloganeering, urgently flashed the company's ubiquitous tagline—IT'S NOT JUST AN ADVENTURE. IT'S A SECOND CHANCE! …

Things Left Unsaid

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I knew I was on the wrong bus, but jumping off was a death sentence. I was afraid, but by then I was used to that.

Holy Week

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one day I will take you / to Grenada

Bandits in the Afternoon Rain

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Somewhere there are fires burning in oil barrels, ragged homeless men warming torn-mittened hands―one day I'll be with them.

Still Life

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She was a moon dancer, keeper of secrets,

Edie Sedgwick #7: A Horse with No Name

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she's greeting everyone like she's the new fucking Queen of England with her size Z tits, the sequined gown clinging to her overstuffed figure like a mold she'll have to live with,

Amber

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I am the marigold wheel no one can understand, the menace your grandfather warned you about. Yes, yes, that last phrase was overkill...

2 empty pipes rattling with passion

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i could make swamp boys believe / under dust-sheets stiffened by ice

Not That Kind of Pain

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What kind of pain is it?

Down Cellar

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Down cellar, my father showed me where he kept his beer stash. It was in a cubbyhole under the bulkhead, where Mom never thought to look.

Once There Was a Way to Get Back Home

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I should have covered myself with leaves. I should have wandered farther from the path.

I Was Strolling Through The Water One Day

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The Killer Whale came back and promised to be nice.

The barbarian at the gate, a work in progress

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I may even invite the little man, who lives in the closet, to come out and visit me: Come over here, pleasure me, let me sit on your pink latex face.

POSEY'S POND

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She leaned up on an elbow, smirked and touched his leg. “Want to do it?”

Lip

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He watches his paralyzed left arm arc across his body, then swivel around and disappear behind his back. He does this over and over again. He's very high and it makes him laugh.

"One,Two,Three,Four,Five,and Six," said Seven to Zero Before Disappearing Over the Cliffs

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“I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.” Anne Frank I know. It's not quite the fun little story you had wanted to be hearing from me so soon after the last sorrowful one took your breath…

MAIZE

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Now, these explosions announced, political bribes and propaganda weren't going to be enough to push things through. There would need to be survival from blunt force trauma and fear tactics, a relentless forward march

Automatic Typewriter

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Rowan’s arm burned and throbbed like the center of a neutron star as it went critical for minutes turned inside-out like hours. Standing in a wall, then huddled underneath the couch, she danced around the rim of consciousness, ripping at the seams of her

Merry-Go-Round

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“Stop!” I shouted. “I want to get off!” The toothy horses showed me the whites of their crazy eyes. “No, no”! they chorused as they whirled around and around and around.

Four Stories Held Thinly Together With Rage

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I. Happy Ending? Why Not! My wife and I got divorced and my little dog died and I decided I'd had enough of Seattle, so I hopped a boat to Belize, and soaked up the sun and gained back some weight and, by God, I got happy again. And I met this cool…

Tomorrow in Tonga

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What would you do today if you knew your time was up