Most recent stories

Betsy

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Lester walked back into the house. He was hungry but didn’t know what he wanted to eat. Really, he couldn’t remember how to fix anything he wanted. He walked over to turn on the television, but couldn’t find the on/off button. Surely the damn thing had an

The Family Tradition

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Your father, his father, and his before that, your mother, her mother, and all the way back have kept a tradition by chance or by will to each have a baby (or several) until…

Conversations in a Chinese Restaurant

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I'm feeling almost better than you know A little bit better than the day before Waking up to a deafening scream Please, please don't hurt me no more Why do I feel like a lost dog? Staring outside the window pane How come I become dark? When the clouds begin to rain…

NOLA's Nightcap

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I need to be commended, despite the wine glass that threw itself at your sister's head of rollers. Imagine a pear in the deli meat aisle ripening behind glass...

Something like A Dark Knight

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Rob was having a hard time of it. His whole life was like that-- in and out of jail for assault, robbery and selling drugs. He tried to go straight. A career counselor, had set him up, with a job in a warehouse. But he just couldn't…

Fugue State on the Waterway

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I am so lost in thought as I ride out of the woods that I forget which way I ought to turn, left or right; this can’t be good.

Five Million Yen: Chapter 8

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He finished the omelet and started in on the short stack. He drowned the cakes in syrup. -Never can have enough syrup.

I Have to Tell You

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‘Sometimes I look down, over this railing –’ —cars zipping tiny and soundless, the roads curling and the roofs speckled with white-hot skylights, dark mottled patches of repair, no stakes, no people, no noise – ‘ –and I consider jumping. Sitting on

Greener Than Thou: Saving the Earth, One Smackdown At A Time

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Are you a hostile person who gets into trouble when you express your anger? Would you like to annoy the hell out of people and get away with it?

Letter to a Distant Friend

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My life is life in shape alone./ The substance leaks away like blood/ removed by the embalmer’s art.

The Waitress Had Freckles

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He took a long, noisy sip from the glass of wine as he peered across the rim to see her walk by."Now SHE would never get our order wrong" he said to his two friends seated at the table with him.The two men looked at each other and laughed. It was obvious Johnny was…

The Story Teller

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I would read her stories on quiet summer days as we sat along the river, just the two of us stretched out in the tall grass, hidden in the shade of the pine trees lining the banks of the Mullica while a gentle breeze cooled our skin. She liked the way I read to…

Two.

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...how he wished the will to live...

Gastro Ad Astra

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He had a simple dream: He wanted to become a star, and not one of those tv stars because those die, those die all the time, and before dying they usually become terrible shadows of their former selves, vile creatures who exploit their own former glory...

Elevator Music

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Of course, no one can control what goes on in an elevator.

Biblos Melas

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While laying in his hospital bed recovering from a minor heart attack, Professor Martin Hellman reads details of an ancient book he has been given for translation--Biblos Melas, or, the "Black Book." Excerpted from the forthcoming novel "Minion Web."

skull of a sheep

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You are in a car speeding through Dublin towards the West year after year the journey uncoils past the same landmarks Kilmainham Jail strapped to a chair bullet to the brain on by the Rowntree Mackintosh factory where the black and yellow and orange and r

The Jade Rabbit, Chapter One

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Even when the sun is gone and things get dark, usually the moon comes to reflect some light of hope until a new dawn can emerge

Keep the Peace

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I thought, what are we talking about? Botox?

Bare Ruined Palace

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Every encounter is a dance, every secret has its key

My First Horror Show

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I remember screaming and wanting to run from the living room that time you came home drunk.

I Hate You

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go ahead stick one more morsel into that piehole

My Brief Career as Sloganeer for HAP

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I needed a job. They needed a writer without humanistic moral qualms to create slogans for the Human Annihilation Project

Glory at the Motel 6

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Rory and Betty Sloan entered the first of 40 rooms in the new Motel 6 to place Holy Bibles in 40 night tables.

U-11 Soccer Girls Gone Wild

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Do you think your mom would come out and take off her shirt, the way Brandi Chastain did the last time the U.S. women won the World’s Cup?

Curiosity Killed the Cat

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rocker bogie system

It's My Birthday

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and the President didn't call.

cloth

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i want out

On All of Those Bad Guys in Movies

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What about the poor nobodies to somebodies being tossed like wet rags onto more wet rags?

Marilyn in Ottawa

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I looked away. Why embarrass the Ottawa woman? Why make her uncomfortable? The polite thing is to move on, forget about it. Stare at the sidewalk not yet wet but becoming wet. Be Canadian.