Stories tagged short-fiction

The Boy from Thuringia

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“The Boy from Thuringia” is part of a series of stories collectively called The History of Adoption. In it, a middle-aged man sets out rather obsessively to write a comprehensive history of the adopted child. In his attempts to finally begin this im

The Strange Ones

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In the morning, I lay on my side and ran a finger down the girl’s back, lightly tracing her spine. I remarked on the whiteness of her skin.

Bones and Blues

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No one's heard from Etta Robinson since her husband Silky died, Silky Robinson, once the best blues singer in the Ozark Mountains. His last years in their one room log cabin, they lived in recluse even before cancer rotted him…

Stiff Licorice

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A wrinkled woman with a maroon velvet hat pulled over silver black hair drawn tight into a low bun gives her waiter a retired schoolteacher smile through clenched teeth. Her lap holds a clear plastic shopping bag with flowers printed on…

Balconies

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In a few brief moments the entire sky became full of this wetness and greyed to the point of almost blackening, and it was a Sunday morning, and the man thought that thoughts were strange things, because he had a piercing epiphany that there was no God..

Arborist Abridged

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Besides, that might have been the area of his birth, and if so, Jacob was now the director, priest, pallbearer, driver, and custodian of a hometown funeral

There's Love, and there's Marriage

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He didn’t used to smell that way, like a rained-on boot, like the insides of a lived-on couch. ... He used to smell like he wore light, subcutaneous cologne.

Piedmont Mirage

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It started with his thumb that she’d been under. They had just crossed over the Rozelle’s Ferry overpass driving up I-85, occasional splatters of rain panging the roof. They heard it hit the floorboard, the pop of a bug on the windshield. They looked ove

War & Peace

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I stand at the edge of the water naked as a newborn. Tiny ripples lick my toes.

Never Mind the Dream

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Turns out the psych wing in prison is no place to raise a baby.

Wipe Your Feet

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I recognized the smile. It was a “I’ve got you where I want you now,” smile.

The Last Day of Esther Levin

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If it weren't so dark now, I'd go outside. One day it'll be easier but right now, not for a long time, it's not in me.

The Shared Transgender(er)

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...I told Uncle Lou I thought it (trans-gendering) looked like a thoughtful way of occupying the world. It was a personal triumph, for some individuals, over the destructive affects of denial. Besides, it hurt no one, and it didn’t destroy property. I alw

Silent Summer

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It's eerie. There are no birds. My friend and I take our morning walk in a bubble of silence.

Freedom's just another word ...

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Judge rode that horse to death, gave me the maximum, forty damn years for second degree, said it was a shame they couldn’t send me to the chair. Oh yeah. They fried people back then.