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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…

Catalog of Disappeared Things

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

Still Life with a Bottle of Olives

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On the table the image is by Chardin but the puzzle is by someone else and that is what he has dumped out of the box.

What She Left Unsaid

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Megan beat up on herself later over the unsaid.

Common Sense

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

Good For The Ducks

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It's dawn. It's quiet on the pond in the Public Garden. The light is calm, the pollution is mild, and everything is still,except for the occasional cruising taxi. It's the beginning of spring-- tulips out, leaves…

Blowing Up While Fading Out

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It calmed the guilt in my heart while kids reveled, laughed, and "made time" with the neighborhood girls on that final night of freedom. No one would talk to those girls again.

4:45pm, Philadelphia

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He stays a couple of yards behind me as we slog uphill. I try to diffuse the tension with a coy toss of head, slip on wet leaves. My ankle rolls and I splat noisily down. From my new angle his beard looks less stylish—bristles straggle all up his neck. He maintains…

The Illuminated Dream

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It broke through the surface of the suburban world and shattered it into pieces, fragments of dreams and amazement. She was not the same as she had been a moment before. It was an epiphany she couldn't put her finger on.

1993, What I Wanted

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Two-way conversation with God.

April

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...he thought often of the rollicking waves, of being pulled under, of being weightless and senseless...

How Elm Trees Die

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I had felt suddenly lighter and next thing I knew I was watching Leonard Tucker and Sister William from somewhere near the ceiling. I saw myself, too, at my desk, holding my songbook out in front of me like everyone else.

Hand and Thumb

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Often we sit in silence and age. We are observers of dust, fashioning ourselves into antiques.

Smashed Idol

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He was the kind of man that I would rather have declawed than date, and then leave him on a gurney, helpless and anaesthetized. Cliff Eames had made me feel that way since we were teenagers. He would never be helpless. …

(From an Awakened Sleep)

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pluck me from the charred grate

To Live It Again

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She began guiding Penny’s arms, whispering movements through her body. Memory and experience sang through every fiber of their being. The song had become her life.

Arcana Magi Memorial - c.4

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Azure walked through the fog as though she were walking to class. Her hands swayed through the mist and felt the thickness of the cloud through her fingers

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.

Tomorrows Never Written and Subsequent Unrehearsed Memory

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For some, a vertical pattern will evoke prison bars, for others, product bar codes.

Bring Me His Head

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Just bring me his head, that cerebral kiln of hot, ruddy verbiage and cadence.

Mona

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Doc and I talked for several hours. When I told him Mona was pregnant, he turned his head and looked at me. “Who's the father?” he asked. Don't know, I said. Mona didn't know, either.

Layers on a Cold Night

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Later that night, he lay his shivering children in his own bed, the bed that betrayed and abandoned him just a few years ago. It will protect them now.

Epithelial Sample

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I found my black dot nucleus. School got me in the 10th year with the numbers spilling outta my head, but now I got the cell on my mind. Everybody's floating around this joint all pink and green college clean, yellow face Japanese, or the jet-headed Greeks with their…

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.

Mr. Smashface eats fast food at Supermarket # 9

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“Now God,” Mr. Smashface calls me out by name.

Cremains

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I need a different storage solution

Cupcake Footprint

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once wedding cake under pillows. now fluffy frosting on squashed defeat

Tattooed Hands

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A 1960’s of walking sugar beet fields to remove the rogue bolters by hand and on other days painting the ironwork of cattle sheds with red oxide. Then a 1970’s when the self-inking explosion of tattoos on his hands and then his body began.

Flying Tiger

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I screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked him if he had shot down any Japanese airplanes. He grinned at me. “One,” he said.

The Intercom

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I have never met Joe’s brother, of course.