Fiction
Grief!
Fiction
I stub my toe on a woman. She’s spread out next to the tub. Her breasts rise and fall. I reach down and rub the hair on her legs. There’s a skirt over her important areas. She’s got a face like a sprain. If she…
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Noma Plus
Fiction
one lightsoff acceleration go and he found himself moving arrhythmically across the surface of an abandoned parking lot and she was backlit by the diffident blaze of a burning mailbox at the edge of a sidewalk shattered into fragments like a bar of bleached chocolate…
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Yarnivores
Fiction
You’ll probably find this funny, because people usually find it funny when I tell them. I used to work as a waiter at this place called Merry Olde England British Pub over in Five Points. Obviously, that’s not the funny part. The funny part is…
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Strangers In the Living Room
Fiction
When I got to Matt’s house, he met me at the door with this puzzled look on his face. There were strangers in the living room. “Who are they?” I asked. “I don’t know.” “Jehovah’s Witnesses? Mormons?” “I don’t think so.” “Friends of Donna’s?” “I…
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My Kind of Utmost Tender
Fiction
“I find myself inclined to stop a moment in my present station, and to ponder that voyage, which I have undertaken…I am first affrighted and confounded with that forlorn solitude, in which I am placed in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster,…
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The Scraping Sound of Auto Parts
Fiction
Your little sister is late. Outside the terminal, a slight drizzle slants in the orange streetlights. Everyone else on your flight has long since been picked up or connected to another destination. You hear her car before you see it, a scraping sound of auto…
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Whaling Song
Fiction
“Are you Middle-Eastern?” She leaned forward with her knees pressed together. “I’m Italian and Polish.” It was a common misconception. He had dark eyes, dark hair, and over the tanned skin of his face a five o’clock shadow which, left to its own devices, transformed…
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Beat: A Morality Tale
Fiction
The ritual is the best part, the pouring of white powder from the brightly colored construction paper envelope onto the glass table, the chopping of it with an American Express card, the rolling of everyone’s twenty dollar bills, the rush of fragmentary joy at the…
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The Tragedy of Gary Moretti
Fiction
Ed. Note: This time three years ago, it was impossible to escape the ghost of Gary Moretti. The nation was entranced by the ubiquitous Tozzi photograph, the hour-long specials on NBC and CBS, and the running debates on newspaper op-ed pages and cable news programs.…
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A B Plan
Fiction
Sometimes I give speeches at elementary schools. I wait backstage in the wings where they hang the discarded costumes of the four food groups, costumes that are now unused, in light of the Surgeon General’s newly revised food pyramid. From here I overhear the students…
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Despite Herself
Fiction
Image used with permission from Mentality Design [Excerpt] Even though he is across the room and reading I know he is watching me. My boyfriend likes to keep tabs on where I am so he can determine where we are. My boyfriend seems to think…
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Tell the Story of Your Father’s Life
Fiction
Tell the story of your father’s life, and your father’s father’s life, and find your own, or find something altogether new, an antipodes of the expected. Expect to find, what? A history of habitude? A cacophony of drunks? Shocking, to learn of hidden happinesses swallowed…
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Jelly
Fiction
Vernon Wilson “What the fuck was I saying? Nothing about what you were saying right?” My hand fell on Tasha’s arm. We were on Canal Street going towards Broadway. We’d been waiting for the light when Natasha, in this sly way she does—with a fluttering…
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Gongguan Digressions // 公館漫遊
Fiction
In his 7th floor apartment on Roosevelt Road, Wan Hao-hsien (溫浩賢) anguishes over his blueprints for a new kitchen god shrine. If life imitated television dramas and commercials, Taipei would be run entirely by eager young college graduates with androgynous haircuts. But in reality, the…
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Red Weather
Fiction
By Pauls Toutonghi Prologue My dad, drunk again and singing. In a previous life of his, my dad dreamed of becoming a country and western singer. The fact that he’d lived this life in a concrete apartment tower in a suburb of Riga, Latvia, seems…
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Secondhand World
Fiction
Katherine Min EYELIDS When I was very young, my mother made me wear a clothespin at night to encourage my nose to form a salient bridge, instead of disappearing into the front of my face and emerging like a mushroom at the end of it. …
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Passover Eve
Fiction
The peanuts, the coconut curlicues, sour cream, raisins, and the small bowl of mango chutney are waiting on the living room table for the boiled rice and lamb curry. My mother’s still cooking in the kitchen. From her bedroom, I can hear Super Mario spitting…
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The Ballad Of Earl King: After Goethe
Fiction
My daddy, my daddy, he got a 1972 Olds Cutlass Supreme, a convertible that car is, metallic flake green with saddle interior and a three-fifty cubic inch V8 that’ll churn out three hundred fifty horses and set em loose on the road. One thousand forty-one-a…
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The Newcomer
Fiction
In an airplane flying west across a wine-dark sea, Spiros travels to his new country. He is an inexperienced traveler and for now the gods look kindly upon him, blowing a gentle tailwind and seeing to it that he is seated next to one of…
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Three Stories: Bottle, Pipe, Asthma Attack
Fiction
Bottle Two guys are sitting together in a bar. One of them is majoring in something or other in college, the other abuses his guitar once a day and thinks he’s a musician. They’ve already had two beers, and are planning to have at least…
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Arid
Fiction
You sit in your cubicle on the 37th floor of a multinational pharmaceutical company, paging through a stack of medical journals. Each time you spot the name of a drug that the pharmaceutical company manufactures, you underline it, and stick a Post-It on the page.…
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Anywhere
Fiction
[Excerpt] Selection 1: Kroll runs down the road with his wife draped over his arms like a sheet. He thinks of a scene from his favorite movie, Avalon, where a boy runs home after accidentally setting fire to his father’s appliance store, and the suburbs…
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The Story That Refuses to Die
Fiction
From GAY AVIATION TODAY, January 2004 (Reprinted with permission, ©2004 GAT Media Inc.) Over seventy-five years after making aviation history with the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh has sent shockwaves through the aviation world yet…
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Squandering The Blue
Fiction
It was in my sixth year, shortly before my birthday, that my mother took us to live with her mother, Dominique, in Beverly Hills. In my perception, we were one moment walking along the beach in Maui, the sky an intoxication above us, and the next, we were beside my grandmother’s swimming pool, the calm water blue and alluring.
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Last Seen Leaving
Fiction
Image used with permission from Mentality Design Fontanka, St. Petersburg, Russia prologue: crash It had been a bad night, anyway. He’d had too much to drink, she hadn’t had enough, and they’d ended up in the parked car, having sex while fat summer raindrops spattered…
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The Ridiculous Common Link
Fiction
Crazy ideas come naturally from a jumper worth talking about To speak about someone or about something means, to my mind, awarding them some privilege. For my part I don’t award that privilege to many people. I do it more for things. A few hours…
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Gaki
Fiction
Autumn rains spill water Upon the barren soil. Forgetting the sun, Seedlings long to sprout. I hear the wind’s lament. I relive it always. I relive that day, the day the Gaki came to my village. I know I remember it; but as I remember…
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Before Using This Air Rifle
Fiction
I waited until I was twenty-one to buy a gun, although, as I learned on the day of the purchase, I had been legally eligible for one since my sixteenth birthday. In my car outside the hunting store, Nathaniel and I unsheathed the thing from…
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Return of the King
Fiction
Benjamin Noam Pearlberg Behind her house, in the back woods where the river rushed lazy and gentle, she went bathing at dawn with her best friend, Shoshana Epstein. Batya was not yet seventeen and when they undressed she still felt the excitement of exposing her…
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{Exceprt} Grub
Fiction
Elise Blackwell Chapter Forty-Nine Jackson Miller, in the middle of one of the strangest nights of his life, felt nothing short of fractured. In a room full of aspiring writers—who the hell else attends a fiction reading—he was a celebrity. But this seemed to elicit…
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from Dies: A Sentence
Fiction
Vanessa Place and here’s where I’d ask you to pay close attention, Johann, we’re getting to the part where everything changes and yet stays the same, if I had a cross, here’s where I’d stick it, and if I had a lollipop, here’s where I’d…
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Lives of the Artists
Fiction
Lives of the Artists In the morning Robert lies in bed watching patterns made by the sun on the floor and laments his predicament. Why did he have to be born at this moment in history, when all the good ideas were taken? Things were…
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The Man Who Could See Radiance
Fiction
The Man Who Could See Radiance Before he saw radiance, he saw the way we all see. He saw his wife Rachel as threatening or contributing to his equili¬brium; an irritation or, sometimes, someone he loved so that touching her was like touching the source…
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Bohemian Letter #1
Fiction
Dearest Eva, Do you remember, love, the summer night we spent in my uncle’s chalet off Como, when we thought we heard a ghost in the parlor? I know now that it was a ghost, and, I tell you, we will never go back there.…
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Where They’re At
Fiction
Where They’re At Joshua Furst They’re everywhere, these kids: Seattle, Milwaukee, Reno and Austin, New York and LA and Chicago, Atlanta, they congregate wherever there’s urban ruin; Rochester, Pittsburgh and Springfield, Mass, if they thrive anywhere, it’s in the rubble left behind departing industry; Lincoln…
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Fruit Salad
Fiction
Dale Peck Fruit Salad Men aren’t meant to be young, said the man who’d given his age as thir—forty-one. He shrugged off the false start, smiled slightly—small, borrowed, theatrical gestures that said, Had I been planning to lie? Or had I merely forgotten? He was…
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Blake’s by Douglas A. Martin
Fiction
Blake's is selected from THEY CHANGE THE SUBJECT I was invited to vacation with his family. They were going to go to the beach at Tybee Island this time, and then on to Savannah, where the movie based on that book was about to start…
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Twelve Fundamentals
Fiction
First there is what matters. Once it matters it is measured. Measured as mass. Mass is the amount of matter in an object. For example, in a rifle. In relations of matter and mass, celestial location is inconsequential. A rifle in the spheres is a…
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Aftershocks
Fiction
You asked how we met. It was a raw night in January. I had stopped at the Viper Room near closing time. A cold martini in my hand was all that stood between me and the fog on Sunset and the steep walk home to…
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The Man Who Could See Radiance
Fiction
Before he saw radiance, he saw the way we all see. He saw his wife Rachel as threatening or contributing to his equili-brium; an irritation or, sometimes, someone he loved so that touching her was like touching the source of all metaphor, making his mind…
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Fruit Salad
Fiction
Men aren’t meant to be young, said the man who’d given his age as thir - forty-one. He shrugged off the false start, smiled slightly - small, borrowed, theatrical gestures that said, Had I been planning to lie? Or had I merely forgotten? He was…
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