Stories tagged literary

81/2 Characters

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Memoir: 8 1/2 characters with dissociative-identity-disorder.

THERE IS NOTHING MORE HONEST THAN PAIN

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My parrot Poe freezes when a crow soars outside the window the same way I do when you approach my door. You come knocking late at night. What do you want this time? I yell. To come in you say, please. Go the fuck away, I respond but you keep…

THE CHAINS THAT KEEP

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I usually idle by Spades Check Cashing on 8th Ave. and catch folks that way. The Homestead cops, they moved stations from a little up Amity to down on 7th, which is closer to Spades, but they leave me alone. I've drove jitneys almost ten years. Only been cited twice,…

Excursions

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I sit in the dark, awake yet aware of another inner death. I breathe in the dark with a disinclination to the cold crimes of my mind. My skin senses the failure of evolutionary processes; a certain kind of abandonment. There is no iron cage of atone

Boxes

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His voice isn't familiar but his words are. He says he knows we haven't spoken in years and apologizes for it. I can hear him pacing on the other end of the line, tapping things and then a shriek of glass shattering. Really, I tell him, no need to…

Harlequin

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One majestic crow swoops down to perch upon a crumbling spire. His menacing gaze fixes upon the blind harlequin, the jerky motions of its wiry hands; the pneumatic, spinning mechanism lodged in its skeletal chest.

After Grief

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Within a day, she had a scummy apartment which belonged to the government. It had cockroaches, which she was not used to. They churned her stomach, repulsive little things. Not even creatures. Two brains, she'd read: one in the head, one in the ass.

HOSE-WATER CEREAL AND DAY-OLD SCONES: A SINGLE STROKE SEVEN MENU

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Gas station mart generic whiskey that smells sketchier than bathtub moonshine. Don’t worry about liver damage or going blind because you won’t be drinking it. You’ll need every drop to disinfect cuts and wounds since you and thousands of others in your co

ALL THERE IS

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Kasper and I are smashing fluorescent light tubes on the ground behind the Dollar Tree, swinging them down like apes with clubs, the world itself our victim. We found the fluorescents sticking out from the store's dumpster, then a handful of large, industrial bulbs which we…

WHAT IS PAID FOR

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The lock came off easy—they only screwed a hinged hasp on the outside—it took a hard shove to get past a chair barricading the door. As I pushed my way in I heard a screeching crash. Lucky nobody was around. It was my first time bidding on a sheriff's sale…

It Will Be the Truth

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As the family gathered for cocktail hour

Gertrude

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When we were young and small we played in the orchard. Mom made apple pies and fried apples, caramel apples and apple sauce, apple cider. Grandma’s apple butter recipe.

Here, You Are Alive

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He doesn't tell her that he is married, and that his five year old daughter who is living at your house has a mother back in that same city

You Pour Vodka In Your Coffee

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I wonder if she is my real mother, if I could get one of those paternity tests and find out if she’s my real mother and if the guy she told me was my father was really my father. I can’t remember him very well, just a lot of him screaming and hollering an