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The Tall Man’s Secret

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I turn the corner and come face to face with Ed, who's stark naked at the kitchen sink. He chugs a glass of hot tap water from a measuring cup and belches loudly. “Good morning,” he says, as he pisses in the sink. “I drink 6 cups of hot tap…

Five Million Yen: Chapter 45

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Ben woke in a black mood. His head was ready to explode and his throat was raw

In Dubai III

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The boy in the elevator with round glasses, / who carried a newly-purchased broom, / was tall and burdened with clothes

Having Fun With Literature

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"The tundra was as cold and barren as Mother Theresa's womb."

Wordswhisperlove

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His eyes begin to glisten like hot green wax pooling around the wick of a pretty little candle.

The First of Many to Fade into the Now We Go Marching Down the Lane for Love Side Street

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for Tracy ThornYou don't need a song about fixed stars, you needa reason to be glad stars are here. Themoon's always been around, but not always like the friend you want,until now. Don't throw it all away becauseyou are too sad to care. You've come into your own. Allthings…

The Bridge

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And the urban sprawl doesn’t hesitate. All around me, I taste the aftermath of bricks, dust and dirt, freshly laid concrete slabs.

Control

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Paul and Mary Jo lived in an apartment at the top of a long, dark flight of stairs that were so high, I remember as if it were yesterday thinking, the night she pushed him down the stairs, he would surely be dead by the time he hit the landing at the…

Micromanaged Truth

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Let your father stay through that dinner when his mistress needed him, while your mother was on the verge.

The Skill in Gravity

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the ones that have seen the other seasons, let them set up the track

Love and other entreaties

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it’s okay, you can come inside me

Leaky Guts

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One day, Dasha confessed to Igor that she had an incurable illness: Purple emptiness.

An Angel at Christmas

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Call it what you may but misfortune, bad luck, disaster, adversity and trials of different calibers can hit us at any time.We are human. We experience the ups and downs of life everyday. Out of a job, lack of money, health insurance and other luxuries that some people…

Sarah Nell

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There are two, though, that stayed for more than just a little while: Marvin and Oscar. Marvin was married and that's all I have to say about that. Oscar wasn't and it seemed as though he wasn't planning on getting married either. What a petty man he was.

A Noir Celebration

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A kind of sucking darkness into A kind of noir celebration of despair

The Grand Inn

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I saw blood. The walls of the bar were completely covered in red shag carpeting. Had I been thrown back in time to the Seventies? It felt as if I had entered Hell itself. No, this was not Hell. This was the Aryan-Brotherhood's version of the movie Shaft. I…

only connect

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lift my love and be lifted

The Fourth Prague Defenestration: 1

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Defenestration - the act of throwing someone out of a window. I went to Prague recently to visit my family’s castle, which is called Krivoklat. I’m not even going to attempt to explain to you how to pronounce that. It’s outside Prague, about an hour t

Five Million Yen: Chapter 13

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-That’s more like it. He released Ben and holstered his gun under his leather jacket.

the spirit of the dead watching. Gauguin

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Listening too much to the night, with its whistles, bright lights of luminescent bursts like leaves on fire, or the raised ear of a cow in the purple mist, or the curled tail of a pig foraging in the night.

Flower Power

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"Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels."--William Carlos WilliamsThere is something beautiful I want to say to you that doesn't seem to make much more sense in a box of clever words like this one. It feels closer to…

Sugarexplosion

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At school, Joe knew the answers to the questions. He used to jump up onto his desk and wave his arm before Mrs. Gestapo told him he would have to stop or he would go to the principal’s office, where the other kids said that the principal made you pull d

Getting over the man in the moon

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First have a good window seat

Weld (St. Petersburg Blues)

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There's one graveyard for the part-timers and another for the full-timers. Ours is a little nicer, but we're still all going to hell. Do you remember St. Petersburg? No, you're memory's not that good.

The Lonely White Elephant in Rome

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the gambling priest stands in the morning fog/red moon hangs in the sky/the army of seven houses marches over the hill

writing in loops

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Antique pens better allow an old soul to express what needs expressing.

Proud Mary

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Mary had no shoes. She told me they were stolen by someone at the shelter and I believed her because she stood there outside the Arlington T stop in a pair of tube socks. She told me she wasn't asking for money. She told me the shelter was serving seafood today so her…

Drifting

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it's all a bit like the quiet steam drifting to nowhere off my microwaved hot coffee in the sunflower mug

Carmen Rental

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But in 1991 Carmen developed a heroin habit and was forced to sell her powder blue, convertible Mercedes 500SL...

Never Catch Me Alive

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We walk with our heads down, maybe 15 of us, moving under a sun that has grown to encompass everything. Everything is in hues of orange and red like a bloody eyeball on fire.