Tag: fiction
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Nora’s Christmas
By Lina Marino Nora can’t escape the holiday: Christmas-themed sitcoms on TV, festive music in the stores, some idiots even decorate their cars with felt antlers, bells jangling on bumpers, the drivers themselves festooned in fuzzy red hats and ridiculous reindeer noses. Her short ride to the mailbox torments her, every house on the cul-de-sac…
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Toot Sweet
By Daniel Webre From the get-go, Jacques seemed an unlikely suitor. I’m sure whoever arranged these trysts was well-versed in reading pedigree papers and such. Surely, they wouldn’t have sent an over-the-hill poodle to do this stud-work. But Jacques looked old. His white fur had started to yellow, though everyone insisted he was peach. I…
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Rendezvous at Three
By D.B. Gardner The Spouse Trevor wants to stay at the hotel and brood over his wounded stock portfolio, so I decide to stroll the wine-colored cobblestone streets of Old Montreal, thankful I’m not wearing the spiked heels from my bachelorette party. Memories of Montreal seep in from five-plus years ago, the entourage of drunken…
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The Fourth Dimension
By Amy Scheiner It happened like this. I was sitting in my kitchen stirring grainy almond milk into my coffee one early morning, when I had the strongest memory I ever had in my life. I’m not even sure the word memory properly encapsulates what happened. The morning birds hummed outside. Even though we’d recently…
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A Short Tail
By Martha Hipley The tail first appeared before her thirteenth birthday and grew in at the base of her spine, right above the cleft of her backside. Her mother told her that this was normal. Her grandmother complained that she was too young—maybe it’s all the hormones in the milk, she said. In any case,…
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The Farmer Wears the Crown of Thorns
By Richard Wirick If you wish to supplant someone, to substitute yourself for them, could wishes be little waves, partial causes, small curling waters like the ones Roger fished in through the rivers flowing north to Erie, the inland sea that could create or be created from anything—glaciers, ice-swales, beginnings and endings of ages before…
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An Existential Question
By Robert McGuill His cousin was what to me? Exactly? An ex-niece…in-law? I was her mother’s brother-in-law until I divorced her mother’s little sister, my ex-wife, Marie…plus, I worked for her dad in his body shop one summer when I was twenty, so that made me something too, I suppose— I don’t know. You think…
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Heat Visions
By Damieka Thomas That summer, we were living in Grandma’s old run-down trailer in Olivehurst, California, which Mama deemed Meth Capital, U.S.A. It was painted an ugly off-white with sky blue trim. For months, there was no shower because the trailer was under construction that never seemed to end since our uncle from the Bay…