Most read stories

The birds who coo

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My mate and I are owned, but have freedom to take to the endless sky.

THE SHIFT

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"leaves &damage, &shifts of shape"

My First Sonogram

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As I was checking out with the receptionist, Dope came barging through the door and told the guy at the front desk that I needed to be booked for this sonogram “right away, like within the next 72 hours.” My hands started to shake and my lower body b

Locations

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They confess love for Karaoke and metal rock. They have purchased expensive Stratocasters and Zildjians.

Girl

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The tadpoles flipped on the brown mud bottom. She dipped one out and held it near, seeing it in her belly, shaping arms and feet and a small, blond head. She set it back and stood, breasts out, arms up. The ducks in the weed, eyes hard like hungry boys, waited for bread.…

Statistics (or: Walking to Work through Lexington Market)

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I avert my gaze to the crab grass pushing through broken concrete, the spent condoms, the empty vodka nips rolling at her stockinged feet...

Alone

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It's not loneliness I'm afraid of. It's how I would be happy to be alone too much.

I Don't Know How the Nights Can Be So Long When Life Is So Short

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The tall, standing woman with bright red lipstick, elegant at one time, you could tell, responding, “She has dementia,” pointing at her brain. “She was a Holocaust survivor.” And the one they’re talking about turns as she’s pushing her wal

Brot und Käse

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I hoped I did not look as panicked as I tried not to feel.

Homecoming King

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John Lipkin took a drag off his cigarette and rummaged through his desk drawer looking for pot. There wasn't any. He remembered looking last night, but he looked again now. There wasn't a damn thing, just some stems…

Ten Tequila Shots

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After sprouting boobs and a vagina before her sixteenth birthday, a girl watches her divorced father fall from parental grace by drinking ten tequila shots and baring it all for the neighbors to see on his birthday.

The New Dark Ages

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It was only later, much later, that we would discover that the war we were fighting was a war between ourselves. Melissa and I left the machine, with Carlton lost forever inside. We abandoned the warehouse. Our backs were scalded from the heat, and the hole in the…

{Pulgas}

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Fleas were a constant reminder that humans are food.

Halloween Hangover

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Did someone say BOO?

Brink of Extinction_Chapter Two

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The year is 2110. The earth is no longer habitual for human beings. The oceans are gone, the sky is red and irradiated and the last vestiges of human civilian are located within the confines of massive barrier cities. For a century mankind has been at war

I Made You . . . (April Fool's Day Challenge)

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You cheat with a stripper--joke I told to your wife. I didn't know that she couldn't take a goof.

Ornamental Onion

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i imagined myself & i was phlox saxifrage pompom ranunculus poppy anemone ornamental onion rattlesnake red ribbon nerine & i loved the painted tongue & i wore the rattlesnake

Clay Women

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"... I knew Willie had gone— out the back door or out the side window. I knew he probably slipped over the fence behind my house into Lou C.’s backyard..."

Hometown News: The Ballad of Ray and Rose

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There’s an old journalism adage, usually uttered by editors who haven’t had their butts out of a comfy leather newsroom chair in years, which goes: “You know… the news just doesn’t walk in the door.” ... But sometimes, it does.

Butterfly, a novel by Julie O’Yang (excerpt)

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‘So what exactly did you decide?'It was two years later that Sato-san put the question to me. The two of us had been hiding for two bloody years, moving about in the marshes along the river, living off small, skimpy meals. We couldn't turn back to our unit, because Cesaru…

Lights,Camera -Action

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Gyan Ban Thoughts - This post is about aspiring models.Scores of these dreams get killed everyday under the arc lights. Exploitation is rampant and millions of cases go unreported.This story is of one such incident.

Macarena Lithuania

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At dinner in Marrakech, Namid danced on the table, waving a white napkin, propelled by jetlag and poor judgment.

Hemera Rises

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The woods. They say don’t wander too far into the woods, where those ghosts can’t hear you and the moonlight won’t trace you a path. In the black crowd of trees there’s something waiting. Don’t go to the where the siren is singing...

You Know Who in The Hell You Are Not Playing For (We Are All Performing At Being)

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I've been avoidingyour beautiful fact for years in just the past few hours it seemslike it was the scariest plague on earth. Andit worries me becauseit's something so new that Idon't know what to dowith myself.Yes I wouldn't knowwhat to…

My Way

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We were over Casper, Wyoming, when some terrorists tried to take over the airplane. They had concealed weapons.

That's Grace Too

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I read the ending to her and it was clear to her--clear as it could only be to a woman, to a woman you're in love with--that I had been describing her.

Tumbalalaika

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When the arguing started, their voices would get louder and louder, till they broke into my dreams. That night, I woke and listened in the dark for what felt like a very long time. Perhaps I should have been afraid, but I wasn't. For one thing, they never

My House In The Middle Of The Ocean

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I built a house in the middle of the ocean. I used sunlight for nails. Wind for wood. Stars for chandeliers, the moon for a doorknob.

A Body Divided, 4

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After surviving the first night in the hospital, I was put into a shared room to save on expenses, and to make room for the deluge of new cases that were coming in, and that was when I made friends with my roommate, Tommy. He was a boy about the sam

Oddities

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One day my wife got so mad at me she raked her fingernails down my face.