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flash fiction

At the Auction House

At the Auction House

My parents buy my eyes and hair. The auctioneer’s small, doting assistant brings the parts over. My mother sniffs the hair and my father holds my bottled eyes close to his own. They had thirty years with me, but can any number ever be enough? A few tears fall. The...

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Charity Case

Charity Case

For all that she wants, Janie knows Mr. Neilson will never kiss her. He conducts. When he conducts, his hair whips, his arms fly through the air. His moustache glistens. There are dark rings in his pits. Janie wants to be the kind of person whose devotion yields dark...

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Song for the Barrio Swan

Song for the Barrio Swan

Marisol goes dancing on Fridays. She leaves at dusk, smelling of kiwi and tree branches, walking much taller in her black strappy pumps. She won’t come home until her heels blister. Later, she’ll say––These are my battle wounds, miren––as she shows us all that’s...

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Marked

Marked

The guide led the small group of tourists through the grand foyer of the Powell Hall plantation house.  Madison shambled far behind the others, eight months pregnant and exhausted by the Georgia heat.    As she and Justin stood in the parlor listening to the...

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All and Sundry

All and Sundry

Do not let your children stand in the shopping cart. Do not let them ride in the bottom of the cart, where pigtails or small hands could get trapped in the filthy wheels. And never — never — leave them unattended in the store. You will linger while looking for the...

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Sweetie Come Brush Me

Sweetie Come Brush Me

1. I jump on my bicycle and keep my head straight when I see the girls a grade ahead of me who have boyfriends at sixteen—like that’s gonna last. They wave. I don’t. I’m heading to Pumpkin Circle to see what’s selling, last week it was crayfish and false hope. I’ll...

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The Ox and the Magpies

The Ox and the Magpies

The yellow, lazy heat trickles onto the rice patties still humid with promise. It soaks into the straw hat of a young cowherd and pools onto the shoulders of his favorite black ox, named Ox. They’re sauntering to their favorite creek, where Ox can have a drink, and...

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Or the Highway

Or the Highway

You can see the backdrop of my loneliness from the interstate. Today it’s an advertisement for the World’s Largest Truckstop, take exit 284. There were other messages before. I’m up here on our billboard’s platform, listening to my Discman, draped in the scratchy...

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Lines Left

Lines Left

My dad mowed the lawn every Saturday morning—weather permitting—for seventy-two years. Vacations were scheduled around it, plans turned down, brunches skipped, because that lawn wasn’t gonna mow itself. When his heart started acting up, and I said maybe he could think...

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Gizzard

Gizzard

My uncle showed me a casting from one of his hawks. I asked if it was the same as a pellet, and he said it was, but with hawks you call it a casting. I knew what a pellet was because earlier that year a lady in khakis had come to my classroom and handed out owl...

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Pulse

Pulse

We walk cautiously along the trail in leaden morning light, here for the spawning salmon and for a change. That’s how she said it on the phone last week, my daughter: I need a big fucking change of scenery. The forest is dank, decayed, ripe with torn-open fish carried...

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