Most recent stories

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

Non-Self: Light, Dark

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You gather their faces in the palms of your hands and their purple eyes blink, blink, unseeing.

Winter Kills

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And on nights like those I conjure Martha's childhood, a little girl who could make the whole world fall in love with her, with those goddam big seashell eyes, enticing adults to fall into a blue-green sea that never ends, never promises survival.

No Place Like Home for the Holidays

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Lu loved his mother, but her anxieties nagged at him like poison ivy. You can't avoid scratching it, but the more you do, the worse it gets.

Curfew

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The Houston police devised a punishment for the adulterous thespian that would not hurt the nights or household income of his French young wife.

Winter '69

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One minute Rudy was sitting up close to me, asking me how could Geppetto make a little boy out of a piece of wood, and the next, Steve was pounding up the stairs, yelling, "Carla, get blankets, warm clothes; we're leaving, we won't be back."

On the Way to Your First AA Meeting

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The memory of thinking in some other language

SEPTEMBER GOLD or DAISY'S SONG

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We left Louisville two weeks after daddy died...

Kite

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One year, she got a kite.

Summer Reading

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The summer everyone read Faulkner, I read Hemingway. Out of spite.