Most read stories

Bad Dad

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When they were seven, he’d taken them out to the desert and let them shoot a .38 at rusted cans. The explosions rocked them back on their heels.

Old man deodorant

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“I’m surprised you haven’t fucked yourself to death, too,” he added, “given your record.”

Jim Morrison Is Not Dead

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At a good distance, he stood. Hair, gray, stringy, long as a horse’s mane. His beard, thick, unkempt. Like a caterpillar, a smile worked across his face. No, he said. It won’t be another Miami. Not another Miami.

Briefly, on Dive Bars

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Every dive bar has a Max. Max is an elderly man. He wears a dented ball cap. He sits at the end of the bar, right along where it curves and then slams into the wall. You may find it cliché, but when Max enters the room, the patrons actually announce, “

The Black Hole

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Matilda went wild at sixty-five. Legs left unshaven for the first time in fifty years, hair still and proud, knotted with forgetting. She’d roam the streets at night, a traveler without design. Matilda was a gardener of sorts, digging up all previous assu

Florida

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In her paper, Emmeline compares Mary Todd Lincoln's crazy, which involved spending lots of money and going to séances, with her Aunt Janine's, which involves wearing cowgirl outfits and running with strange men.

Place de la Revolution

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We are a funny story, my brother and I. Twins of Africa in a kitchen on wheels the size of a cupboard, we serve tourists baguettes and pain au chocolat, in the gardens adjoining the square where the tricoteuses did their knitting, heads were chopped and..

Seventh Floor Ward

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Hers is the kind of crazy that can't be masked. She's worn it on her sleeves since tenth grade.

Zom Prom Mom

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We fucked in the backseat like the verse of a b-side, and that was enough to make him think my boys were half of his body.

Mothering in Real Time

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"If Hillary can forgive Bill, why can't you forgive Dad?" my seven-year-old son wails one night as I put him to bed.

diversion

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The Gulf

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My 99 year old mother...

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.

The Weak Force

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So I walk behind Sandra’s desk and I put my radioactive tum-tum right up to her beaded dreadlocks and I tell her about the nuclear energy that is flowing through her right now. She laughs and screams at me the way I am sure her daughter does when someone

I Hate Your Favorite Band

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He (after learning of my former occupation as a record store owner): So, what is your favorite band of all time?

That Particular Diamond

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looking space packed right in up therelike a sun bleached kite stuck in between the several bluish colorsof the sky today has its ownamazing heartbeat. I can seeit clearly from here. Oh I can feel it reverberating for miles andmiles. If I look away it…

Okay, I'm In

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I get what you want done from me. You want the old one two sucker punch that goes straightaway through to the tenderest part of the aching heart, the one that tumbles you out of your old worn out gut wrenching way of living life for…

The Oddest Thing Ever Found in a Pocket

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On an October day in 1909 Mrs. Prudence O'Kannady, industrious wife of Mr. Joseph Patrick O'Kannady of Corn Falls, Nebraska, discovered, while sorting clothing for the wash, in the pocket of a set of dungarees belonging to her youngest son Rufus, a tiny human head. When…

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?”

Boyfriends

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He's Eric Roberts, the stalker and eventual killer in Star '80.

Arcana Magi - c.8: Realization

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She found herself standing before a mirror, her body was not in the reflection. A pulse shot out of the glass and her heart matched its resonance.

The Damned Thing Out

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Something was there. It was undeniable, and he turned to face the padre, whose eyes were now clenched shut. Without asking for further permission, he moved his hand in-between the intestines, which felt like curtains of tightly—wound chorizos. Suddenly

Letters, notes, conversations, partings

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Writing as parallel form | Writing a parallel line | Seeing stealing | Stealing seeing | Stealing as seeing

Lay on Me

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On Friday nights I'm not there.

Yeah, yeah, it takes two

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I'm rushing from the office, wanting to catch the 6.05, skittering down grey, commuter-laden streets, and I turn into the plaza and see the stupid fucking dancing couple. They are usually only there Fridays and weekends, catching the tourists on their way into Covent…

Spike. Resonance.

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Under the Dempster El and off in an alley, the girl taps the vein. The buildings moan. Thirty below wind chill, and the girl's jacket is cast aside. Her pupils dilate. “My mother, my mother, on this night, my mother, she died,” she says. …

Waiting for "Barney" (Mordecai Richler's version)

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But there’s a special place in my heart for Richler’s tour de force of a novel, his grand finale, Barney’s Version. It has everything — humour, a whiff of mystery, poignancy, a suggested reading list for a literary illiterate like yours truly, the Falstaf

The Egg

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It was spring. The stepmother brought her newish daughter to the toy store for a surprise.

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

The Motel

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She dreamed of a beach.