Posts tagged “fiction”

  1. What do you like, he said in the dark after the first time and they said everything you do, I like everything you do. And I’m here, I’m right here, believe that. And what do you like, they said in the dark time after time, and he said, everything, really, and they said no, tell me something, what do you like, a fantasy or something, and he said I have a rape fantasy, and they…

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  2. 1. Just let go of the wheel and keep your foot on the gas, I heard myself think it, simple as an item on the To Do. I had just left my father’s house, and I was speeding towards an intersection when the lights turned—it was like I saw it from above, the cars screaming towards each other in a x of red and white—but I felt no fear of crashing. No itch either. I…

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  3. Like it or not, Imogene was under his thumb, a wayward girl far off her path and seeking comfort in the face of torn buildings. Her hair she’d dyed pink and blue in places and left blond elsewhere. Her head was a crown of confetti, chopped fronds you couldn’t even call mop or rag. Panteen didn’t want anybody else wanting her. She was his on the dead grass out by the levee, in

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  4. You can train a man on most things he needs to know using regular table food, my Auntie Gin says. See this? She pinches an inch of skin above her hip. That’s lard that got that there. That’s the beginning of I don’t give a good goddamn, and I will fuck strangers in your absence. Be a witness to my warning, is my philosophy.

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  5. We were up for whatever. We were all up for whatever. That's the one thing I keep coming back to. What were we up for? Whatever. Were we up for it? We were. In the end, there is no one to blame. When you're up for everything, sooner or later, everything will happen. We were up, once. Are you up for whatever, they had asked us, and to the ones who said Yes they had…

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  6. The problem is, the decision is not two roads diverging in a yellow wood. It is two roads in the wood and a third you think you can see just out of the corner of your eye. It is a fourth dashing through the woods like a wolf. It is a fifth in the sky. It is a sixth in the ground. The problem is, it is not just the two roads diverging for all…

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  7. Learn that you are frivolous. You are told this on a Saturday by an editor who rejects your manuscript. You had submitted it six months ago, newly unemployed, giddily setting free your first submission as if getting sacked were really just a bohemian blessing. Now you learn that you are possibly worse than an idiot. Some TV show lauded for grittily glamorizing the lives of young urbanites might depict this scene in a bright coffee…

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  8. Amy first realized something was amiss in the third grade. There she was one minute, staring out of the window, thinking about the blueness of her classmate Jonah’s eyes, when suddenly a week had passed.

    It always happened like that. She would lose herself in a daydream and then lose herself in real life. She’d imagine a comet hurtling towards the earth, laying waste to the school, then wake up a day later

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  9. Evan Lavender-Smith's previous work for The Butter can be found here.   Tell your mother the roast is overdone. Tell your father he can start cooking for himself, if he likes.   Tell your father he didn’t fix the ice maker right. Tell your mother I’m not a plumber.   Tell your mother the laundry’s dry. Tell your father I’m not his maid.

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  10. After all, perhaps it is we who need saving. Perhaps we are the abnormal ones. ­– Eugene Ionesco   Bob finished it first. Stop everything, he told them, and get to your nearest e-book store. Paul found a PDF online. He clicked to download. Thirty-three minutes, it said. They waited. What did you like about it? Frank asked. It was… Bob began. He scanned his shelves, wooden and wall-length, full of books he’d actually read,…

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  11. Three doctors confirmed I suffered from some sort of emotional herpes and they suggested I stop fucking everyone. No more but I was bored, but he was cute, but she was cute, but they were bored and cute; just close up that trap of myself. The thought of doing so flung me into the pursed lips of the pastor and I couldn’t help wondering if his lips were as tight as his asshole. And if…

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  12. All the children had been given away, and now Darcus Mullins found herself driving the curving road up toward Isaban to look again at the burning slag heap. Along the way, she would pass the house where Leonard had been sent, and she would slow the car to a crawl so she could peer down into Hatfield Bottom where he sat playing in the mud with his new foster sisters, patting pies into shape and…

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  13. It’s 4 a.m. in Zagreb, Croatia, and you’re wide-awake. You and your husband are on your honeymoon. While he sleeps, you admire his black curly hair and thin nose, envious of his ability to rest. As he rotates to his side, you wonder what images are crossing his unconscious and whether he’s ferried a phantom of you into his dreams. Jet lag has left your body disoriented, so you mime resting poses. You feel like…

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  14. The waves heaved with foam and the sun illuminated everything until it was so bright the edges of objects seemed to be drawn in black. Claire leaned forward and spit up into the bushes that dotted the perimeter of the beach. But it was more than spit-up. It turned out it was a whole stream of purple. She’d been drinking wine cooler all afternoon, and now the beautiful color of it came out and landed…

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  15. My ex-neighbor Bill comes over to my place on Thursdays to stare at his ex-wife Janine through my window blinds. There’s a restraining order that says Bill has to stay five hundred feet away from Janine, but he pays me ten bucks an hour because I can get him to thirty feet without anyone knowing shit. Bill always brings his binoculars and a six-pack of beer. Sometimes we order pizza. Bill sits in my recliner…

    24 comments