Most read stories

The Bear (April Fool's Day Challenge)

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Poor Daniel gets the ultimate trick played on him by nature when he encounters a bear for this April Fool's Day Challenge story.

Etymology

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In every word there is both music and history. Music from the way sounds come into union with each other, and history in how they get there. There is form too, sure, but I am not a calligrapher. I'm a scribbler if anything. And so my sentences look mo

Countdown

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I’m twenty eight years old, and I am dying.

thing

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Waiting

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He grew red-faced at her quiet words, "I'm pregnant."

The Point Of It All

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He understood that people no longer read or thought deeply about things but continued to write anyway. He understood that Einstein's theory of relativity was proved correct during the world's longest eclipse of May 29, 1919 when photos of the Hyades star cluster…

The Artist's Conk

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Whenever talk dies, or darkness gathers too closely around the breakfast table, everyone knows the list of ritual activities we can brightly suggest to skip the day forward.

Open Orchidae

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But Jana insisted to see this miracle, this antidote for the mundanity of existence.

Eat Drink Grow

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Can you see me dying? 'Not quite', Said Mummy, 'because it happens Very slowly all the time.

Sophie's Choice

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Sophie is a cat. I tell you this upfront so as not to get you all wound up about moral angst, Nazi's or a mother's love.

Displacing Charles the Bald

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I try to envision long-haired men riding horses across a vast expanse, their faces blank as those of my students.

Music Box

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Katie loved butterflies. Katie loved daisies. Mainly, Katie loved presents.

The Day After Falling in Love

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The day after falling in love, I became unmoored from everything familiar.

dovespeak

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If, for just a crystal moment, you will submit to being a dove...

Sweet & Sour

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Since the divorce had gone final, the matter settled once and for all, he’d taken to a masochistic bingo of sorts.

Prom Date

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The dump smelled of the chaos of creation, of rusting metal and burned glass, chemicals and rancid rainwater, wet cardboard and rotting wood, paint slaking off clapboards and drums.

Corvus

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Bracing himself against the wind, Zach gets to his feet without a thought for direction or destination. In the white forever of this place, there is no lantern to light the dark and bitter woods of memory. Even the croakers would find little use for such

Cloud Gator

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First it makes me think about the time I held a live, albeit tranquilized, juvenile gator at a zoo in Florida when I was twelve. (Somewhere these's a photograph, no doubt, of me looking terrified and a gator looking asleep.)

Tarot

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He had no idea about the first three cards - what he would call the flop - which looked dubious and full of danger.

Vow

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“You buy shit, it’s gonna smell like shit,” he said. “You should’ve come to me like I told you and got a good deal with my nephew.”

Shirts and Skins

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The boys finished their laps and returned to the center of the gym, Hamid shuffling up last, as usual. Amid the T-shirts and shorts, he wore faded blue slacks and a grubby, long sleeved dress shirt. He always dressed that way, even in gym class, as though

Osmo's Bells

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Worldwide, sturdy bells quickly superseded decomposable, and edible, cheese balls as jesters' preferred cap ornaments.

Blind Spot

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If the photographs made sounds, they would rumble like static from an impending thunderstorm, pressed between the pages of a yellowing dictionary. Compressed sound, searching for the proper words.

Making Love to God (or: A Profound Man)

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"I would physically — not metaphorically, mind you — make love to that avocado..."

Invasion

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That summer crawled with them, insects of every denomination: cicadas caught by the cat, wingless, came to rest in the roots of the garden we planted; sudden swarms of dragonflies...

The Maze

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The man with the truncheon emerged at the monorail car's forward connecting doorway. One moment the space was vacant, a faux metal canvas for the dazzling sunlight streaming through a grime-encrusted window. When next Theseus Harrow looked up from his seat the dark-suited…

inevitable

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A Conversation Between Bacon and Eggs

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In a hot splattering we were born

Morir Soñando

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While Erik rubs my back, I fall asleep. I'm not lying on my bed in Florida - I'm face down on the pavement outside Brooklyn Pharmacy. And it's not Erik's hand smoothing oil of cassis into my skin, but that Officer Green's meaty one gripping me . . .

Regret

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Every time I read a great line by another writer, I feel fear.