Posts tagged “fiction”

  1. She wakes, and there is the dark, the muted smell of soap, and the sound of the stray dogs rummaging through garbage in the streets. Today she will drown herself. She lights the oil lantern, and in its glow, dresses; her joints ache with every bend and extension. While blowing out the lantern, she tucks the flowers underneath her arm. Her room is a small shack standing atop the roof of the Hostel Leguia, and…

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  2. It was after Suzy served up cocktails with my suitcase that I wondered about the truth of what she’d told me. We sipped on our brandies and she said I’d have to go. She’d kept me around in the hopes I could protect her, but if this was what happened with me here, there wasn’t a need for me to stay. All of it seemed a bit too easy. I swore the figure in the…

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  3. This is a very short story indeed, but you should still read it.

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  4. It was a hot, windy day when we addressed Rosa Herrsch’s Facebook posts at our weekly board meeting. This was in early summer, when in evening the part of the sky that faced the Holy Land grew purple, and the mockingbirds seemed to echo our pain, and we in turn echoed theirs. “On Facebook, every damn hour she’s cursing the Holy Land. Rosa--and such a sweet woman!” said Moshe, who had recently joined Facebook, newly…

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  5. 1.

    When he offers me a ride home, I think there’s no reason not to say yes. There’s a car coming towards us down the winding forest lane, headlights screaming through the darkness, but he’s all caught up-

    “I’m not supposed to drive on my medication,” he says, and I startle, so he reaches for my hand. He says “No, it’s fine. I haven’t been taking it.”

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  6. Go out to the Lie Tree, daddy would always say. 

    No matter the size of the whopper, us kids marched down the dusty back road, across fallen leaves and prairie dog holes, to the stately pecan tree, its twisted branches beckoning the sky. Sometimes, if the lies were really bad, we were forced to crawl the half mile on our hands and knees until we reached roots. Later, when the scabs

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  7. One time you took food from my mouth and you didn't want to but you did it because it was my tongue. That's what I think about. You liked me first because of that one day when Mr. Donovan asked me what I thought about some story I hadn't read and I said it was wicked proper and when he asked me to elaborate I said it was wicked fucking proper and got sent to ISS for the rest…

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  8. i.

    I woke up again on the bedroom floor.

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  9. Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she pushed one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office and tried to take a bite out of him than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again. Animal memory made her try to scamper along the bare hallway and let in another guest, but the one she’d bitten thrust her away from himself so hard that she landed on her back and

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  10. L Bear's last piece for The Toast was "His Career Will Be Absolutely Fine: On Telling People About Being Molested" and if you didn't read it then, you should read it now.

    He told her casually, whilst he was washing his hands after dinner, that they could not afford for her to fly back home for a visit. She vomited when he said it, but he said nothing. After the first bout of

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  11. Newly trimmed nails painted with baby-shower-pink polish were attached to gold ringed fingers, which were attached to a smooth-skinned hand that picked up the duffel bag on the curb. The owner of the manicured hand, a young-looking mother who suffered from the slow toxins of time and an unfaithful husband, was waiting on her daughter to speak although she did not want the daughter to speak. They were standing in a highly public place and…

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  12. Ashley Burnett's last piece for The Toast was about a superhero breakup. My husband was too far away to hear me, but I said it anyway: “I don’t think we should knock.” I watched him as he stumbled through the tall grass, past the gilded gates that led up to the mansion. I hurried after him, but didn’t run, and kept near the lime trees that lined the path. My nose stung with their…

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  13. I think that Chelsea picked me because she knew that I was willing and malleable, a brown clay girl sprouted from ragged roots thirsting for water, my Otherness as imposing and pervasive as a beached-whale rotting beneath the tug of an occasional wave. In those days, I was always picking at my cuticles like they were flecks of gold. I think that we all have that one friendship that defines the confusion of girlhood. The…

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  14. This post is brought to you by Mikey, who is shameless enough for a link to his Tumblr but too skittish to give his last name.

    We stood arranged in a gleaming white row, like teeth. Our hands were in gloves, our hair set into soft curls, and pinned with magnolias, lilies of the valley, and peonies. We laughed gently and smiled with surpassing sweetness, but the sweetness contained an edge

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  15. I would never, ever ask you to read a 5000 word short story about a robot family if I didn't absolutely love it. This is GREAT. - Ed.

    The robot family upstairs has a mother, a father, 1.5 children and a dog. The l.0 of the children is a robot girl, the .5 is a baby boy. He cries at regular intervals throughout the day, like an alarm going off. Emily could set

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