Category: Fiction
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Fruit Punch and Rotten Eggs
Each year, word of Miss Karen’s pool parties circled like buzzards at bus stops. It flowed through the halls of the elementary school like an unseen current humming through electrical wires. Third graders told incoming second graders who were lucky enough to have been assigned Miss Karen’s class about the end-of-the-year bash in hushed tones…
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Texting Harriet Greer
Jordan Gregg moved in about a month before the end of the school year. Mom found the timing of The Gregg’s move the sort of odd that borders on downright scandalous, what with enrolling two kids at Glenville just weeks before summer break. I’d been at camp for half the summer and up at my…
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A Deeper Shade of Blue
The only thing Lindsey wants is a big old stick of blue cotton candy. It’s all she talks about the whole car ride. It had to be blue. If any color had a biggest fan, that color was blue and that fan was my little sister. She keeps going off about how she doesn’t like…
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Running Home
Emma was in Boston the last time she’d ventured out for a jog. It had rained that morning and the puddles lay like landmines along her sidewalk-to-pond-and-back circuit. The mud splashed up to her ankles and had caked thickly on the laces of her running shoes. Now, in the living room of her parents’ Pennsylvanian…
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In the Absence of Swans
Boston, March 2015. The garden awakens from a winter deeper than any in recent public memory. The last in a line of four girls seated on the pond’s perimeter screams dramatic fury as winged bodies, en route to plunder the thawing earth, whisk behind her head. “Where do the swan boats go in the winter?”…
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Fodder for Retrospect
The limp expression on his face was nothing new, but it still tore gently into Monica’s chest each time she looked at her son. With each tear in the fabric of motherhood, she buried the urge to give up, to send him to another doctor, to admit to the nagging suspicion that she might be…
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Pushing Carts
He had his back pushed against the wall, his knee acutely cocked so the sole of his sneaker found support on the bricks. A lone plastic bench sat cemented in front of him and beyond that was the expanse of the supermarket parking lot. He was the only one out here now, which was rare…
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Care of the Moon
The sun drips behind a mountain range. Lustering clouds bulge high then widen. One breathes in droplets the gracious welkin as if in sport. She is graceful in her expansion, cycling through a billow of personalities. Each begs for attention. Each swells for interpretation. A girl bends to pick a flower. As she tilts her…
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Nature’s Farthings
An unending summer is as rare as a winter wont never to cease. Spring grasses are ever wet and a phantom chill assails autumn gusts. To live where we lived for our sole year, where nature endows ample and nearly equal time to each of the quarterly climes indeed molded the memory of how the…
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The You Not Looking
Something’s been holding back the words. It might be the version of me that’ll read these lines one day. Winding me down back roads toward a painted horizon, as fabricated as one on the set of an old western. Pulling my eyes from the one I’m driving towards. Still, something’s been holding back the words.…
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Knee-high by the Fourth of July
On the opposite side of the road passed the third pickup he’d seen that afternoon donning an oversized American flag waving in the blackened air behind the cab’s smokestack exhaust pipes. Patriotism, he thought as stomach acid warmed his chest, muddied and misled. The giant flag, strung from a 4’’X4’’ wooden post, flapped in animated…
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Four/Twenty-seven
The woman who has just taken the empty seat next to me wears the same fragrance I have been programmed to tie to you. I, for a moment, forget where I am, forget who I am, and mesh again as the being we formerly referred to as Us. These senses take command and they tell…
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Consonants and Vowels and Eggs
This guy’s been here almost every day this month. He always ends up sitting in the same stool, but only after sitting down at table 14, looking up and down the bar, walking back toward the door to pick up a Globe and scan the headlines. Then he pulls out the crossword and studies the…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 