Most read stories

The 24-hour Date

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We watched kids tweeze snapping turtles out of the park grass. They dropped them into a styrophoam cup and called it the snap turtle home. When they grow up they will bite your arms off, their father said laughing.

Literate Reply

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an oven mitt in Dachau

Illicit

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... a moth, a kiss. A silence.

ANYONE but Shakespeare

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Shakespeare was Shakespeare, after all, the greatest poet the language has ever boasted: why did Shakespeare’s contemporaries even bother with their paltry efforts?

Fictionaut Is Audited

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Somehow, random phrases and sentences from the stories, comments and profile pages were generated as “replies”.

Pool Toys

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Confused, I paused and locked eyes with the girl who’d just bounced it with the long, dark hair. “I just saw you with it.” She stared back at me. “Do you see it in my hands now?”

At a loss

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I used to charm you, hold you in my hand.

At the Wedding

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I wear a white dress. I vomit on hers.

Bougainvillea

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Marcel Proust ran about the grounds chasing an itinerant tennis ball and kissing the guests, his huge testicles sweeping the lawn.

Yadda, Yadda, Yaddo

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I arrived at Yaddo, the prestigious artists’ retreat, in the summer of 1941. With America’s “day that will live in infamy” several months away, my own day of infamy began the second morning of my residency.

Over Fifty

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Yet it was another thing to grow to become indispensable to someone without whose infirmities the helper could not exist. People in general had started to call that helpless requiring “codependency,” but to Althea that word did no good,

Arcana Magi - c.15: Chisame Murakami, Sentinel of Genbu

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The water burst into droplets of rain and fell on top of her. Chisame laughed out loud, a joy that overwhelmed her as she repeated this feat over and over.

Aviary

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I am a 33 year old drag queen, and I frequently confuse my dreams with reality. Each morning, I awake to a research project: what has actually occurred, and what was a dream? Today I woke up believing I'd lost a pound, so I weighed myself, and I was right.…

my first racist joke

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"There's a guy and he's standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon."

Goddesses

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The man she loved did not love her. At first she prayed to Athena for strength and steadiness. She began to knock on wood, spit on her…

Mussel Memory

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Andreas Cappelanus taught that the word / “love” comes from the word meaning / “to fish.”

Rodney & Chelsea

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Chelsea's breasts are more the size of tangerines, but he likes them. He likes that she smells like Fruit Loops and that her front teeth overlap slightly. Her mouth is glossed. He slips his tongue inside.

Skyscrapers

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I love to lie when discovered. "I'm your new neighbor." "The landlord sent me." "I'm the ghost of the girl who died on the 11th floor." "I fell from the sky." I wear billowing white dresses and a wide-brimmed straw hat that throws my face into shadow. Peo

Why We Came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday Night

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Donnie remembers just in time. So we run practically every stop sign and red light in town, and get there just before they close.

Cabana

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Night at the Reservoir on Airline Drive

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Del and I watched my brother toe his way to the edge of the cottonwood branch that arched over the reservoir.

Surrendering August

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on the far shore, in the vineyards timed charges explode like the sun catching on fire it scares crows away from the grapes

Ants

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I don't know what happened to all the men. Used to wonder if they killed them all.

The Thief

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I said, kiss this.

a crushed pepsi can floats down

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These days, even God has a day job.

Carapace

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He gathers our abusive fathers, our esophageal tears, our peanut fetuses.

French Vanilla Death - Seconda Parte

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The lead man, who did not seem to be the most important or distinguished, just the one walking in line before all of the others, knocked twice on the door and opened it quickly. He stepped gingerly through the doorway and the others filed gloomily in afte

Swimming

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I held on to the edge

I Am

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When I was a boy, I always wondered if Dad were black. No one in our small town looked like Dad. He had the thick features of an Arab. If he let his hair grow, it piled up in messy loafs on his head. Of course, I never asked Dad about any of this. I wasn'

Full Tilt Boogie

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Your tongue is enlarging... wait, it’s growing hair. No, wait, it’s planarian flatworms, an earthy taste oozing down your throat. A terrible itching spreads from your solar plexus, under your skin everywhere. You know if you scratch even once, you won