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fiction that lingers long after the flash

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Kintsugi

Kintsugi

One time, a porcelain doll lived within a music box. Beautiful, everyone who saw it said, pale skin and dark hair, raised en pointe with hands brushing the sky, forever dancing in an endless twirl. The doll was fragile; everyone knew that, but no one paid much mind....

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Blackberry Pie

Blackberry Pie

Cora couldn’t explain why she was baking a blackberry pie at three in the morning, even though she hated blackberry pie. She couldn’t explain why she dug into every cardboard box, searching for all her kitchen tools. She couldn’t explain why she tossed everything else...

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Weed

Weed

The sky went dark on a Monday, pushing the straining sun behind a curtain of smoke, creating an opaque swath of grayness where light would catch – lost – never making it to the retina, never lighting up the things we had been used to seeing: tree leaves in the...

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Good Dog

Good Dog

Dad calls it “Eyesore Trashtown”. I don't read perfect yet, but looking at the letters on the sign, I don’t think that’s right. “It’s called Eastlake Terrace,” Mom says, hugging her purse tight and shooing me into the elevator. “Dad thinks he’s funny.” Dad wasn’t...

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Dog Years

Dog Years

I was on our excuse for a back porch, no one ever put in screens, and it smelled like oranges under my finger nails. Jack lowered himself into the lawn chair next to the old Boy Scout cot I was on, looking up at the rain-stained roof with bits of tar paper peeking...

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Nest

Nest

“The birds are always watching,” Mama used to say. We had a bird cage in nearly every room of the house. The parakeets in the living room seemed more at home than I did. The lovebirds in the kitchen reminded everyone how bonded they were every time you tried to make...

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Coyote, Bones, Howl

Coyote, Bones, Howl

CoyoteThe house slept while I stayed up stretching, trying to fit my body into this world, knowingsomething ancient lives inside me and needs to ease into sleep. It worms its way through mybloodstream. A howl, released with a stretch to hide its strangeness. It is all...

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A Perfect Pair

A Perfect Pair

My husband has this idea to marry a laundromat and a bowling alley. “A perfect pair,” he says. “Like us.” He’s an idiot. Who’d want that? “Think about it. Now they wait for free, but we could clean up.” I roll my eyes. “Maybe some video games or an air hockey table...

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Boys in Boxes

Boys in Boxes

The men are dying. We’re the boys who see them. In tabloids, on news bulletins. Faces pocked with purple lesions, bodies ravaged by weight loss. Their abandoned eyes, their hollowed-out stares, hold us. We’re told it’s a plague of our own making. Our fathers—both Holy...

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Our Father

Our Father

There’s a photo of our father, donning a black suit, standing under a tree, with a mischievous smile and a diamond stud in his left ear. He was at a wedding, at a funeral, at a party, at a business meeting, outside a church, behind a courthouse, in another city, in...

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Secret to Marriage

Secret to Marriage

They sit in silence on the farmhouse porch. It’s nothing, he hopes.  Earlier as his wife lay sleeping, toes twitching, nightgown transparent from sweat, he’d turned away, denying her protracted slumber meant anything. He brushed teeth, brewed coffee, ignoring his...

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I Come From Aliens

I Come From Aliens

There’s a picture from my wedding where my father looks at me with his face all screwed up with concern and his hand scratching his head.  Forty years later, on the couch at the dementia ward where he now lives, and I visit, he gives me the same look. This time, I’ve...

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Neighborhood

Neighborhood

Occasionally I walk here, when the weather permits.   Today I spot a man watering his garden, a riot of grasses and Yarrow bushes colonized by bees, prairie flowers penned up with Zinnias. A tall and forbidding something with bulbous green knobs that attracts...

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One Night, the Moon Starts Crying

One Night, the Moon Starts Crying

Tears falling to earth in gulps of rain. No one knows why the moon is crying but everyone’s making a guess. Mr. Blake from the hardware store blames it on the fact that no one buys light bulbs anymore. “Got them LED things that never burn out, and soon,” Mr. Blake...

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You are pulling your hair again

You are pulling your hair again

and I don’t say anything as you drop each strand on the ground and I wonder are you okay do you need help is that good for you as I see patches spread across your head and I know that it’s not good for you, but it must be if you are still doing it even after everyone...

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contest winners

Kintsugi

Kintsugi

One time, a porcelain doll lived within a music box. Beautiful, everyone who saw it said, pale skin and dark hair, raised en pointe with hands brushing the sky, forever dancing in an endless twirl. The doll was fragile; everyone knew that, but no one paid much mind....

read more
Blackberry Pie

Blackberry Pie

Cora couldn’t explain why she was baking a blackberry pie at three in the morning, even though she hated blackberry pie. She couldn’t explain why she dug into every cardboard box, searching for all her kitchen tools. She couldn’t explain why she tossed everything else...

read more
Weed

Weed

The sky went dark on a Monday, pushing the straining sun behind a curtain of smoke, creating an opaque swath of grayness where light would catch – lost – never making it to the retina, never lighting up the things we had been used to seeing: tree leaves in the...

read more
Good Dog

Good Dog

Dad calls it “Eyesore Trashtown”. I don't read perfect yet, but looking at the letters on the sign, I don’t think that’s right. “It’s called Eastlake Terrace,” Mom says, hugging her purse tight and shooing me into the elevator. “Dad thinks he’s funny.” Dad wasn’t...

read more