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Companion Wanted

Companion Wanted

Seeking a companion. Need not be romantic; platonic is fine. Just someone to wake up to for that morning breath that feels stale with closed-mouth soft snores, and those eyes holding long, floating eyelashes that I want to touch but won’t. Just someone who will empty...

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Cappuccino

Cappuccino

Capuchin monkeys are named after the monks who are named after the drink or something like that, could be the other way around, so when Sam says that Olivia’s voice is like cappuccino we nod but we don’t really know what it means because none of us have tasted...

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Everything Is Fine On Planet Jell-O

Everything Is Fine On Planet Jell-O

The brother, Paleo, and I are doing inventory when it begins raining. Acid. It’s Acid Rain. The one that strictly arrives on the first Saturday of every month, to burn away the soil nutrients and kill the grass that has grown since the last acid washing. It’s a very...

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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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