Most recent stories

Talking Down the Flames

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She'd always been an odd girl, nearly raising herself. As she got breasts and hips the boys complained that she was easy to get in the backseat, but afterward the car wouldn't run, not ever, like the engine died the moment they used her willingness up. So

Turning Thirty

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Of all the authors in the library, it was a wife from Maryland who called out from her marriage dormer I was not to read her.

Let Us Pretend

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"Perhaps a divorce?" she continues, thinking of his thin, long hands and how they almost, not quite, but almost, made their usual pattern on her body, remembering having queried many men on what their most erotic sexual encounter was and found that the an

PIGEONS

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Ellen decided to soft-pedal the one month to live thing. Really, there was barely time for the patient to read Ellen's brochure.

Trees Knees

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A young man pushes a stroller filled with a sleepy child. A young woman strides alongside them, her gait leisurely. They are the first to visit the park today. The trees loom, vigilant.

LYES

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Chusma de la Calle had the most beautiful scarves. Gentle, warm sheaths of silk she kept in a special drawer lined with tissue and rosehip sachets tucked in the corners. She had scarves of every color, but most were shades of her favorite, blue. …

Turtles Don't Have Hair

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“You’ll have to do better than that,” Skip says. My husband laughs. He has a high girlish chuckle when he’s truly delighted. He can sing really high like a girl, too. “All right,” I say. I leave my headband

Two Cinquains

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SPOT ON OUR LUNG We sense A stillborn dawn. A furtive, lurking gray, A sleight of dusk, eclipse, that follows Us. TITANIC'S LANTERNS Upon My rain-glazed panes Wet lights from neighbors glow Like lantern beams from shipwrecks…

Coat and Shoes

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Walking in to work from an unfamiliar direction, I saw her, on a street I had never been down before. I was coming from his place, for the first time, after the first time. The first time, but not the first date. That's not me. I'm not one to... not one who... He worked…

Solzhenitsyn Juke-Box

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My handwriting, slow in coming over many years, is good for lists, but I don't want to read sentences or write in it. Amber is on a list I wrote of things I want to remember of Russia: Rasputin's death and Peter the Great (6'7”). One of my lists I read as a poem in…

Rescue 1973

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I remember it was raining and I didn't have an umbrella and I was standing there on the corner, waiting for Rudy's school bus, thinking, Why don't I have an umbrella?

Read Me

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I won’t be eating much anyway if someone doesn’t start reading me. I’ve got to get a hook so people will be drawn to my work. I’ve got a few concepts I’d like to share with you. See what you think.

Adultery and Africa

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“What would you think if I committed adultery?” She pauses very briefly before replying. “What, you got time on your hands?”

Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!

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Morpheus dreams… […fairground atmosphere burlesque hand-operated steam organs calliopes cut and spliced reversed harmonium kaleidoscopic grotesque waltzing carousel…] PABLO FANQUE'S CIRCUS ROYAL Grandest Night of the Season! and positively the LAST NIGHT BUT THREE! being…

Snuggie your Life Away

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Who is the moron that invented the Snuggie?

Training Exercise

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The other day I’m in the backyard with one of my kids, doing what he’s calling a training exercise, which is basically the two of us with flashlights, shinning the beams over the grass and up into the night to see what we can see.

The Guerilla Drive-In

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“Don’t you wish it always ended that way? The right people fall in love? Romance leads to marriage? God, that was a great movie.”

Smiles Etched Into Stone

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A section of the baseball field that curved inward was filled with clear water. Birds were dipping their feet and the tips of their wings in. The sun set them apart enhancing the ice-sharp oblivion in their eyes. I swore I heard them say "Marry me.

Tournament Legend

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Man I can hit a shot from forty feet. Snap! No rim. You can’t.

MYTHO-THERAPY ON THE BLINK

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Once upon a time, not so long ago in Los Angeles, Jack and Jill Woodman’s father remarried.

The Truthmobile

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She's had a magnetic sign made for the side of her Honda, TRUTHMOBILE, simple and elegant. Maybe too simple; she's worried it suggests a religious affiliation.

The Boundary Line

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These things were indeed the wealth of our respective nations.

Gravity

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"seventy five degrees longitude submerged in holy rivers out of my mind emerge anointed paramahamsas"

Cabana

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The Wind Chill Factor Kicked In

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People disappeared in the 70's—young girls, teenagers, they always said they ran away. Nobody really believed that the next-door neighbor was capable of that kind of horror. These two girls disappeared and the police had been digging up the farm of t

Po-cash

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“Black is up, red is down,” I said, knowing he turned to pleasant memories of lawbreaking when he felt discouraged. I asked him to meet me for coffee. He said he hadn’t bought a coffee in a year.

Bravo, Scrittore!

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I hadn't yet assembled enough pieces of Italian to explain any of this, but it was hardly necessary. The fact that I was a scrittore in a language foreign to her seemed to make me especially fascinating...

THE GIFT

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If you run into my Aunt Lucille, put your head down and keep walking. She knows when a person is going to die. She knows when a fatal disease is heading your way and she doesn't keep it to herself. She told my best friend, Mary Lou Pierce, don't bother

Melliflua and the Fauns

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In the land of Nebbia, the mistiest part of Etruria, it was the month of Agnosto, when anything can happen, and Melliflua was pondering what to do about the fauns.

If I’m honest

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We lived in a Holiday Inn trying not to be depressed that life had turned out to be so much like Eastenders, trying not to acknowledge that the thrill we’d got out of each other was the thrill of giving in to the wrong thing. We had more sex than ever b