Stories tagged short-story

First Lives

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There are some, I am told, who never see the dead, though I am as yet unable to believe it.

Brothers on a Stormy Sea

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AT THE BEHEST of the younger of her two sons, Virginia looked remorseful after she approved their trip to the island. That was on a Saturday evening while listening to a flash report on the radio about the weather surprisingly calming down in the usually…

Inroads

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We lived in a small hut built in the middle of a coconut grove. We also had a small outhouse and a woodshed where we kept our sow, chickens, and the big gecko with red eyes.

The Book

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The woman returns from the store with an armload of books. She reads them quickly, one by one, over the course of the next few weeks. But when she opens the last one, the woman frowns in surprise. All the pages in the book are blank. Every single one.

Agitated Birds

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I stood frozen in our sub- par apartment complex pool. Two bees buzzed around me, it was the perfect metaphor for the current state of my life. I named the bees, “writing career, and job.” In 6 days I was turning 29 and I was still unpublished. Yesterday I…

The Telescope

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The man meets a woman while out on his lunch break. She seems nice; they strike up a conversation. Before leaving, the woman gives the man her telephone number. The man goes home and thinks about it. It’s been a long time since he’s been on a date.

Queen Isabella Eats a Pineapple and Misses the Jews

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It was Christopher who got her thinking about the Jews again. He had left the same day they did, and so all were connected in her mind, as if together somehow. She read his letters half-wondering if he would mention them, wanting to know if the Jews were

Animals in the Sky

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When the great comet passed over, everyone was at my door with pitch forks and rifles with extra long bayonets. Don’t kill it yet; I want to study its habits.

Persephone

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There was a velvet king down there in his earthy house. His name was Hades and he had a bad reputation: the lord of death, etc.

Dionysus the Liberator

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We were known at every hipster joint and gay bar on Fifth Avenue: the Weslyan-diaspora bar, the Oberlin-diaspora bar, the ex-Lesbian Avenger bar. We just drank all the time, every night for months. We drank athletically, doing reps of beer then whiskey, t

Honduras

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In Honduras they say a prayer that sounds like screaming at the top of your lungs...

Best

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Two thousand and two was the worst year for love in the history of sports. People carried their sadness around in wheelbarrows.

The Tall Guys Club

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Some of the guys wear earplugs. They wear ‘em because they don’t wanna hear it. Oscar Livitt fucking. Nobody looks.

The Death of Lawrence Keyes

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Ruth opened the obituaries and saw just one entry: “Lawrence Keyes, age 94, died on Tuesday of natural causes. Though Mr. Keyes's organs appear to be in good shape—he breathes well, even after having died—he is not an organ doner. He is survived…

Multiple Personality Disorder

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I remember your mother- she had sixteen different personalities and got arrested because she thought she was a trucker fighting like a sailor one night at the bar and I remember your father with his trailer and the boxes of blow up dolls and dildo