Most read stories

The Captive

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....sees the beginning of a new day through the closed shutters, hears the guard washing up at the sink, feels the beginning of a cry in his throat.

Laundry List

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• Don’t confuse the virtues of bananas with the virtues of banana bread

Comes After Cato

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When they called him down there to the morgue to identify the body, he drove behind the wheel of his truck like some steady maniac on a long haul. The Ford 150 cried out for new shocks, but that hardly mattered. Mud plastered side panels and…

Admiral Cheng Ho's Lost Compass

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“Cheng Ho didn’t go just Cape Horn; treasure ships visit Australia and America. His very advanced compass. Not just point north-south. Show east-west too.”

Catalog of Disappeared Things

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He runs a mail-order business from a storefront and distributes a catalog of disappeared things.

1993, What I Wanted

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Two-way conversation with God.

20 Things I Learned about Norman Rockwell from "American Mirror, The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell"

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His middle name was Perceval. He judged the first Miss America contest in 1922. He saw himself primarily as a storyteller in the Dickensian mode.He claimed to be an illustrator rather than an artist. He disliked driving but loved to walk, and preferred…

An Object for the Sun God

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this one was abandoned... a splinter left under the skin, pushed out by protective flesh

Little Pi.ec.es

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I scare my daughter when she sleeps because she thinks I'm going to kill her.

Latitude Adjustment

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Down South now means August cold snap, the forties roaring my wool cap off my head.

The Nielsens (part two)

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[continued from part one...]After sweeps, my schoolwork started to slip. I had trouble paying attention in class, and my workbooks and tests came back from the teacher marked in ketchup red ink. I had always been a good student, and this academic…

Wounded Knee

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“They picked me up in their spaceship about noon,” Austin Grantham says to me while pulling up an apple crate to use as a stool.

When I Met Ian Curtis

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Okay, no freaking out. I mean, this isn't a suicide note. This is suicide fiction.

PLAYGROUND

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Marie shrugs. “Maybe she’s just late. Come on, let's wait by the jungle gym.” She runs over and starts climbing. The jungle gym is closest to the path that goes into the woods and down into the canyon. She has to get him into the woods somehow.

Disorienteering

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At night, on these New England roads, there is no light, no pink sodium-vapor glow, no guideposts.

Arcana Magi - c.24: Desperation

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Oryn woke up in her desk. Sweat trickled from her forehead. Staring at her notepad, with her latest calculation, she forgot to go home. Her thoughts of Alysia calmed for now, but still lingered from her dreams.

The winter I was going to meetings

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It’ll die in there and the stairwell’ll stink for weeks, Greg says in the car. We’re quiet, considering that.

About My Dad

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My dad drove a Model A Roadster and had a photo taken of him on a hunting trip up in Wisconsin with one leather boot up on the running board and a .22 caliber pistol in his hand like Ernest Hemingway and Clark Gable rolled into one My dad ro

chet baker

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chet baker shades my eyes rippling through the cool water sometimes we feed the fish

The Serious Writer and His Penis

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Only strong personalities can endure such size, the weak ones are extinguished by it.

Sociopathic Medicine

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True love may last forever, but the most I've ever gotten out of a lab assistant is two years, five months, three weeks, twelve days, and fifteen hours. And he was the exception.

Variation on a Variation of a Mode

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Borges must be so proud somewhere

Paris

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the boredom inherent in living in the suburbs

Human Frailty

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Conceptio culpa Nasci pena Labor vita Necesse mori

In the Woods

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...a blunt thrust of a face, uncongenial in profile, and the ubiquitous green cap that says John Deere, with the yellow ideogram of a deer for graduates of our local schools.

Antenna

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When I squint at her from across the table I can see the waveforms created by her carrier signal.

A Woman Who Watches

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She was a beautiful woman. I don't argue with that. I welcome it.

Common Sense

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'Yer a cool, cool glass of water baby....'

World Trade Center

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I can feel the souls of those who perished here They’re still here like old kites hanging in the sky tattered, but they won’t come down or can’t come down just yet because they haven’t fulfilled their unborn promises t

Twedes

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“Last night the Scots invaded Sweden,” I wrote, “to retrieve the silver filched from the Irish the Norwegians had in their coffers when Sweden conquered. The Swedes offered the Nobel to a Scots writer to keep ... the peace."