Stories tagged redemption

Decrucifixion

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"Isn't it time to remove the nails, and put Jesus to rest once and for all," Mary asks.

Grand Mal With Grown-Up

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"... especially around puberty when they made you strap on the hot larynx loin cloth with lanyard puckered as a surgeon’s scrub mask ..."

(1) Nan

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[Her adviser] looked at her and tilted his head, smiling. Over his shoulder she saw the M104 bus cruising up Broadway, and considered diving under it. Instead she took off toward the corner, in shame, and he followed. When they parted ways, he took her ha

Mare

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She pulls out of love, while you sit upon the rumble seat, a granted is taken for every crack of the whip. She pulls out of fear. She pulls.

Karma, Old Dogs, and Fine Men

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“You people remember the thing you learned in science about every action creating its own equal and opposite reaction? The same is true in other realms. All of existence is continually recycled…again and again in infinite permutations. In other words,

Independence Day

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Not long ago, Owen the Second showed her a skull. He kept it in a brown cardboard box in the top of the closet. "My first wife," he said, and sneered, his lip bunching up around a scar just under his nose.

The Bridge Between Angry Streets

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The streets are fast, and they are hard; for anyone, right down to the insects who are unwittingly sentenced to a hard surface hell.

Agape

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Every time Hector left his home he wondered if it was for the last time. It was Monday at 2:45, so he was standing in the bedroom near the tall mirror, staring into his dark eyes. In the past, she would lovingly help him dress with her tiny, perfect fingers. She…

Twin

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Brandon had never liked standing in line; it was a childish tendency he had never grown out of. What likely annoyed him the most was likely the stillness, the lack of motion despite everyone else's insistence that they were getting somewhere. And it was slow, too,…

The Needle and the Damage Done

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“She never knew her, you know?” Chief Jack Gardner, retired, said to the duty officer absently, thumbing a well-worn photo in his rough calloused hands. His gravelly voice cracked a bit when he said it, catching his throat.

Bad Dad

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When they were seven, he’d taken them out to the desert and let them shoot a .38 at rusted cans. The explosions rocked them back on their heels.

Buoyancy

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When I ate with my girls, Bliss and Victoria, I would lift my head up and look at us eating until I could imagine him chiding me. “Our daughters are looking more and more like you each day,” he’d say. “Fat!” I didn’t feel like eating when I thought abo

Turnings

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“Help me,” the man said in his mind. He lay beside the folding camp stool alone in the middle of the woods, in the clearing where he and the dog always rested.

Family First

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“Don’t do this Jack. You are better than this.” He pleaded. My lips curled, “Maybe I am, but you’re not.” I spat. I lifted up his delicate frame and threw him back against the wall of his office. I watched as his head bounced off the decorative brick

Litany

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We drove through the night in that old green car, all the way from New Orleans. The road was your mother, your father was the sky. I tried to sleep in the back seat, only to be awakened as you swerved from side to side, planting firecrackers in tin mailboxes. You lit…