Not long after she moved – ties cut, no looking back, he'd never find her on that side of town anyway, if he bothered to look – she found a string of Christmas lights at the thrift store when she
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Short Fiction
Short Fiction
The Sword Swallower Cuts Their Tongue While Saying Goodbye
The weather was good today, you answer whenever I ask how are you, how was your day. I don't know when we stopped talking about what mattered the most because you won't tell me. I ask are you
...
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Short Fiction
The Night Library
I heard it before I saw it, a jingling of bells like the soundtrack to a corny Christmas movie. Then out of the mist rolled a small carriage, round and bright as a converted pumpkin. Florescent
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Short Fiction
Dallas Fireflies
It began at a sports bar, the kind of place the realtor would call "happy-go-lucky." In other words, if your barstool wasn't sticky, assume it had just been swabbed clean by CSI. There was graffiti
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Short Fiction
Castrapitheca - City of the Ape
To call this elegant metropolis "The City of the Ape" does it a considerable disservice, but it is impossible to avoid. Every time we speak of something being as old as the Ape, we reaffirm the
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Short Fiction
The Trees Have Eyes
He wakes with a veil of fading orange sunset falling over his face. Slowly, he raises a hand, twisting it through the shards of light. There are no callouses. No dry cracks of peeling skin. It is
...
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Short Fiction
The Waiting
Near Paulo's home, in the rich deep earth, dark eggs lay. They waited for decades, to be brought to hatch. When they hatched, they hatched death, or dismemberment, bursting forth with all the energy
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Short Fiction
Absolution
It was real cold that night, not just Miami cold, and it was late. I'd had to wait until the girls were asleep to go out into the pre-Christmas lunacy of the mall because my wife and I were keeping
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Short Fiction
Suspense & Mystery
5 min
The Tiger Talk
Royals Primary has the second grade corralled into the gym.
"What you want to do," I tell the kids, "is draw a mask that looks a lot like your face. As close as you can get it, except we're going ... [+]
"What you want to do," I tell the kids, "is draw a mask that looks a lot like your face. As close as you can get it, except we're going ... [+]
Short Fiction
Glacial Motion
August brought with it a new easy-swallow scheme by a new self-improvement mentor. Luna Rojas had measured out her life with the likes of them – detoxes, spiritual awakenings, fad diets. She craved
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Short Fiction
Disappearing Acts
When she left, Anita took Mom's valise, the round one with the wooden handle from Eaton's department store. Mom was furious. She'd had it on hold at the store for weeks while she earned enough to
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Short Fiction
Bargaining
I remember when my world divided into male and female, when the girls screamed "Shaun has cooties!" across the playground and flushed with what I thought was anger. I remember being in a closet with
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Short Fiction
In the Name of Love...or Hate
The name on the chart, Winnaker, tightened my throat. Funny how, decades later, a word can evoke a memory that evokes a physical response. It's a good thing the evil woman's name hadn't been Smith
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Short Fiction
A Happy Color
Jake lay in the darkness, the sun creeping under the shade...thinking why should he get out of bed. He had no place to go, no one to see and nobody would be coming to visit. He probably wouldn't
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Short Fiction
Maggie and Mary
First thing every day, I count out the same colorful cocktail of medications into Mother's four containers: morning, midday, evening meal and nighttime. Two pink pills shortly after waking up, and
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Short Fiction
Inheritance
Joan feels remorse for having hated her toes most of her life. She inherited them from her grandmother, who had hated them too. Her grandmother had cried at the swimming pool on Joan's 11th birthday
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Short Fiction
Out of Reach
He was reaching for the top shelf then stopped. He moved his eyes to the next, lower shelf down and chose a jar. His hair was sheet white and his body frame resembled my father, tall and heavy set
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