Stories tagged flash-fiction

I Wish I Could Say This to Your Face

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The day you came home, after three extended tours in Afghanistan, I wanted to welcome you at the bus station, but I was afraid you'd attach yourself to me again.

Joking

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I don't care much for Joking, which is not to say that I don't care at all for Joking, just that I don't care much. I would say, if I had to say, that I care for Joking about as much as I care for a cousin, not a close cousin, one I have a genuine frien

Forgotten Moments

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I write to do the impossible.

Patch

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The cat lay in the street, the right side of her skull smashed into the pavement, brains oozing and blood pooling around her...

Surprise Return

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Maybe writing had become my religion.

Gumbo

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About the time the two crackheads were driving lead shrapnel into his bound and gagged family’s skulls at the old house on Hargett and Salisbury, which would become famous for one of the most horrific crimes the city of Raleigh had ever endured, Smedes We

East of the River Prut

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Three of them were beating the horse with branches the size of small tree trunks. The other one, the man with the crumpled fedora, stood in the courtyard sharpening something that looked like a machete.

Magpie

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After I find the condom wrapper lodged in the vacuum head I sit on the carpet beside the bed for a long time. I watch the magpie in the backyard diving at the pool of water that has gathered on the uneven patio stones, it's sleek…

(girls in their summer dresses)

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The life, the burning up that works up our loveliness, hot under the surface that is tempted to show forth its parts after being confined, enclosed, shut in. Beautiful honey-water sliding out of long bleak skies, after all the howling of our legendary you

Max's On Broadway

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It was a lousy night to be lost.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

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Eva stepped out of the hut she and Javier shared and slogged through the mud toward the coop to fetch fresh eggs for Javier's breakfast. None existed. Javier became angry when he didn't get his eggs. Eva slowed her pace as she neared the door. She knew wh

Latex

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Sometimes the scenes were benign: a chair draped with a blanket, the smell of black tea. The other ones infected her late into the day: one from a girl with henna hair who wordlessly handed in a form. Patrice saw a noose dangling over a wooden chair and f

Missing the Forgotten

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Twenty-six years after leaving, I wanted to forget.

(an exhibit of nature, a girl's legs stirring the air)

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Few could have foretold what a fine stone intelligence you brought with you into the world. You were like a festival, bringing water to the mouth, the birth waters exceedingly fine-shaped that one ordinarily has to sail to the moon for. To become wet, t

'Hardly Guarded' by Leanna MacFarlane

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People won't shut up sometimes.