Most read stories

This Is How Far It Is

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How long has this been going on? the admitting nurse asks.

A Memo From The CEO

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Over the last 30 days we have seen a radical decrease in our revenue stream. Our Q3 earnings fell dramatically short of what we had projected, and as a result the leadership team has had to look at some difficult cost-reducing measures.

What’s the Dark Matter Doing to Us in the Dark?

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Will it// scare us shitless when we can finally/ draw ourselves a likeness of it?

Swimming Lessons

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He came up from under the water and looked at us. I asked, Whatcha doin' here? Then he said he was going for a swim because the water was warm. Mickey and I looked at each other. He is going for a swim because the water is warm, I told Mickey. Then his…

Crossing the Center Line

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He was a Decembrist but he was not / one of the hanged

A Loser, Either Way

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Although I'm twenty years older than her, my girlfriend has called me "jailbait" for the past year and a half because she says the only way to stop having to share me is to kill my wife..

Poetry Hour at the Regional House of Pancakes

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The waitress appears and Fred gives her a big smile and th3 once over. It's no wonder he's had so many women in his life while I've . . . uh . . . read a lot of books.

Brains

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My memory is like tracks in the snow. My memory is cookie dough. My memory is dirty tube socks.

More from The Chronicles of His Demise

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Dread and drudgery sour each day

Industrial Revelation

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I tell my students about a timewhen seniority was told by the number of fingers on a worker's hands No weekends or overtime, children — bare toes dangling — twelve hours on the line I look for…

No Dogs! No Dogs Allowed!

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the impression I had gotten of him was that he was fifty percent yuppie and fifty percent drug dealer from Marin.

Words

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often visit me in my room, so quietly, so suddenly, buzzing my head with wonderful, possible sentences. Sometimes I find they've been there radiating all along, children ready to burst out in a sneaky fit of laughter if I move just slightly…

The Immunodeficiency Of Our Collective Hearts

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a set of 4 poems

Clinch Park

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There was nothing on the lake but a / faint sailboat and a shadowy gull.

Edward Ogle the Second

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doomsday kittens

Stableford

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Mike Summer's moustache was perfect. Hard bristle and so symmetrical it looked cut to the angles of a military imperative. He was pretty proud of it, thought the team of beaters, who watched him as he sat on the boot ledge of his sage green Mercedes 123 T, combing…

The Judge's Wife Part 7

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—A little blood puts some life into the work, said the old artisan smiling.

Read Through

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“Professor Gosser,”continued Victor, “I once screwed three women in a row--I mean of course, time, not space—good one, huh? Well, each woman farted at the exact moment she climaxed. Would that qualify as coincidence? And did it have anything to do with th

Dark

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Slowly, she eased me into my place where I melted into the dark seat

A Sudden Keen Nostalgia

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Junior year, word got around that Eric had lost his virginity to his sophomore girlfriend. She rode him on the back seat of his car. Eric wasn't keen to discuss it - he seemed to feel a certain blushing shame. It was almost as if he was raped.Eric was a scientist, first and…

LIES

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When I was nine years old, I fell through the rotting boards that covered my grandmother's cesspool and nearly drowned.

Chicago

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For some reason in my daydream he would use the formal “ma'am” to approach me, despite the fact that we were in a swarm of sweaty grunting men in the basement that smelled like feral animal feces and jock straps.

First Crush

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I wanted those jelly rolls so bad I could scream

Pacific

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this orient tide come occident: this roll of wreck and reckoned eyes that fathomless are found or made to find her keep within the tight shut shell in soundings deeper than the plumblined soul these western waves gone east: these…

Five Million Yen: Chapter 22

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-Looks like you could use some light, Austerlitz, said one of the men in a heavy Russian accent, or perhaps you prefer the dark?

The Fourth Prague Defenestration: 7

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The family castle, Krivoklat, pronounced something like sheevoklat, where my maternal grandmother’s family ran a hotel, was founded in 1109 A.D. (how long our family ran the hotel business is anybody’s guess, taken over by the Nazi’s, then the C

how to live on coffee and prayers

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The coffee filter rustles like the Pages of your notebook, which Only tires you even more. Make your drink strong to Make up for the lack of resolve In your shoulders, and Your weak promises. The familiar sound of percolation And you reach the…

Politicouscous II

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In which era was it not a scary world?/ Last century, the perils were both red and yellow/ after Jerry was undone. Now, they’re brown/ and cross, without respect, the Rio Grande

dream lives and cancers

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Around sunset or sometime after, we are on the futon talking about dream lives and cancers. He asks me about my ideal living situation, my ideal career, my ideals in general. I would be a turtle, I say. I would travel and have a home I could always go to, I could always be…

The First Several Chapters of His Memoirs

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He went for long, quiet walks. These seemed to quell the seething rages swirling about him as he exhumed and reconstructed the truth of himself.