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The Dead Horse on CNN

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The dead horse on CNN was floating there in the floodwater

Who Will Carry Us?

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1. People avoided Mac, the Great White Hunter, which was how he liked to think of himself, even though he was not white. Mac was cocoa colored and stalked his prey nearly nude. The city was his…

We measure all this distance in Longing

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“I’ve decided to make some money by filming some of it, making a film and titling it The Nascar 500. It’s a great money maker and here's the gimmick: instead of the usual porn soundtrack it would be the sounds of stock cars racing around the track.

What's Eating William Gass?

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Sometime in the 60s a philosophy teacher named William H. Gass was writing a novel. He had it about where he wanted it when someone stole the manuscript from his car.

Lockdown

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I'm explicating Emily Dickinson when the alarm starts: three long, two short. Lockdown mode. Only there was nothing in the staff bulletin about a drill. So I tell the students to get down on the floor, away from the window. I open the classroom door and lock it from…

We Cannot Cross the River

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We cannot cross the river until it freezes. Bekker predicts January. For food we gather leaves, berries and roots from the thick forest behind the cabin. Suarez boils what we find into a revolting paste that we spoon into our mouths with dirty fingers.

Puppy Love

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That was the summer that Christine Nelson owned me. It felt like catching the flu. I had it bad. I was about to turn seven, and it was my first time, and it was bad. A love like that, I don’t know, it’s not a love supreme. It wasn’t completely cru

The Accordion

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If I play my accordion too loudly while you're painting, you complain. You stamp about in your room under mine. You fetch the broom from the closet and use it to thump vehemently on the ceiling. I feel the vibrations through my feet.

Beds

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Called in sick at work for a week straight when I first met Tony.

Faith in the Rest

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She had the smile of a pixie on mushrooms in a disco ball universe, and I dug her style.

How to Make a Baby

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Eat slowly. Wait. Do not bring reading material. Do not bring headphones. Avoid distractions.

Papa

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Fridays always said it was time for golf,which left me wide, wide like the space between your teeth,on the stoop til you'd let me share your palm with your nine iron.I was a utility. Your gap toothed divot tool or a headcover that had your smile.Sometimes you'd gawk back,…

Drummers

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My mother loves Phil Collins. When my brother and I were young, she told us she was his back-up drummer, that he'd send a private helicopter to pick her up whenever he needed an extra hand. Though we never saw her leave, we decided drumming was in our blood, and…

Meander

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Things are a little out of hand. Information fills room after room after room. I have no bloody idea where I am. I have your photo, but the navigational coordinates are difficult to interpret. Where the hell are you, anyway? I don't like mazes — too much like…

My Affair With Tiger

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Face it girls, you want to claw my eyes out, don’t you? Or whack me across my 36 DD’s with a golf club, am I right? Well don’t blame me if I’m young, gorgeous, full-breasted and obviously the cat’s meow.

when i take a hint, i take it really hard

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it's the constant reminders of something that was never a constant remind her but i suppose there is no ticking clock on that which is wondrous and it was right right it's hard to come up with cleverly phrased universal truths and it's hard to make…

Another Supper

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The man was older and had never found a wife. Years of accumulated pain had short-circuited his instincts so that the first time he met the woman, he doubted her. Each time he spoke to her, he felt himself responding, but he wouldn't allow himself to plea

Magnum Opus

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The scaffolding had been difficult to construct. The rock floor of the bluff offered no purchase, so he'd been forced to anchor braces to the trees behind, then span some thirty feet. A cantilevered gallows reached another fifteen feet past the stage...

Aviary

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I am a 33 year old drag queen, and I frequently confuse my dreams with reality. Each morning, I awake to a research project: what has actually occurred, and what was a dream? Today I woke up believing I'd lost a pound, so I weighed myself, and I was right.…

Magnificent Pigs

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I retrieved the book from the middle of the room and set it in front of her. "Look," I said. "If we open the book up again at the beginning, Charlotte's alive. She'll always be alive in the book."

Slime Me

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Abner was a child who wanted to get slimed. He hungered for the spread of slime across his skin, his favorite the viscous kind that crept to cover, coat, encase. He oozed homemade do-it-yourself Mad Scientist slime though his fingers and hoped someone wou

Road-trip

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She is thinking about her baby, the one she loved for exactly one month before she lost her forever. Now, all the love for her baby is coiled in the pit of her stomach and it has fangs and venom, and it is leaking into her blood, her bones.

CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS

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Joanne Simpson sat in her pew of the church that dominated her tiny town, listening to the buzzing of disturbed voices like a hive of bees trapped in a wall. She knew exactly what was wrong. Some parishioners sat on the edge of the pews, while some whispe

There Is Nothing Left To Do But Care

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He was the kind of cat who began lifting weights in the fourth grade.

One Day

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I was ashamed of my conscience.

An Unlikely Rapture

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Chills begin on my hand where his cool lips meet my skin and ripple through me. I try to focus on the road and cock my eyebrow. “Not bad for a 15-year-old.”

Clicking

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Reining her small hands around the molded handle grips, her bottom bouncing athwart and wildly off the seat, Symphony wrenches her center of gravity inward, commandeering as much control from the road it would allow. With her breaks behaving as stubborn

Paddy Wagon

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So many are so sick.

Planet Crabby

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On Planet Crabby a boy met a girl and a girl met a boy but neither couple got anywhere because they dismissed their prospective partner as just plain too crabby. Alternative arrangements were unthinkable. This happened a number of times.

Every Step, and There Are Lots

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Her plastic shopping bag brushes your leg. You look into it and all you see is a 2 liter of Coke, a bag of Lay’s potato chips and a package of Oreos. It’s so oddly touching, so purely American, that your heart breaks a little bit. You want to hug t