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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…
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Sunlight on the Number 9
April brings out the sunglassed ladies who don their frames on an afternoon bus ride through South Boston. Yuppie chicks and their bug eyes and dark lenses hide vulnerable souls from interlocutors found on smart phone applications they meet over drinks. Polarized eyes aid the creation of plausible lies. Vanity is victorious. There in the front of…
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Attic
All day I have been hearing jazz faintly playing in my room. It does not seep through the wall nor does it rise from the chambers below. The riffs are generated within my mind. My ears glimpse phantom sound waves—unseen, invisible. Their nonexistence will startle me any longer. For I am a music box of…
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Observing a Sneeze
Leaving the country for the summer can be kind of a big deal for 15-year-old girls. While it is not always the case, a venture like this can be a game-changer, moreover, a life-changer; going to Rome for three weeks of the three months of freedom between academic years did more than alter her worldly…
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Penned Out
Ideas, once inked in permanence, are now buried beneath an ever-growing, pixelated timeline. (Is it so much different than having them closed between bound pages and set up on rarely visited bookshelf, the stacks in the library surrounded by thin carpet tread upon no longer?) They are suffering silent agony in the bottom of a…
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Street Parking Woes
Angelica hadn’t worked there but three weeks before she realized something was amiss. On Friday, she walked to her car during her sacred lunch break to find the all too recognizable florescent orange of a parking ticket envelope glaring from under the passenger side wiper blade. It was the fourth time the parking authority had…
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Radical Writing Mantra
Plunge beyond the blue yonder. Sail high. Shoot visible tingles out of your fingernails. Explain an event. Order disorder. Keep the details to a minimum. Do not provide a frozen description or a still life. Provide action. Zoom in while walking backward. Invent the compression shot on paper. Purger thyself.
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Darkroom Lighting Adjustment
He glimpsed in her the possibility of an unwavering light; the constant, overpowering source of life that allows nothing dark to stay without an interrogation proving its validity. She, for a moment, caught sight of a hidden trove of underexposed prints in the darkroom of his soul, and with her assuring smile, replaced the gloomy…
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Askers and Tellers
A thought on verbal conversation. It is a noticeable aspect in conversation that when one party offers a piece of information the other party will either respond with an inquisition about said tidbit of personal data or reply with tangential information from their own experience. Reflection on exchanges where one type of response outweighs the…
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Here Has Been Us
At the end of the driveway, out of reach from the parental sensor light, the car off save for its accessorized music maker, two adolescents conversed. “Maybe I wasn’t driving at all. Maybe the roads were actually operating as treadmills and they moved under us. We remained stationary. We didn’t really just drive there, the…
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Snow Dances
Dusty waves of snow lap the pavement in curved sheets, rounded like a preschool teacher’s sample shapes. A lesson in scissor dexterity. Wind propels the white mass against my shoes, breaking formation like a group of synchronized swimmers, dancing in spirals around my calculated steps and meeting again on the other side. Floating in fluid…
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Mr. Most Likely to Succeed
I started another restaurant job yesterday. The kid who trained me my first day introduced me as the guy who was voted most likely to succeed for his high school yearbook. He grinned and chortled like a tranquilized banshee immediately after divulging that information then proceeded to tell me how important it was to drink…
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Depressive Tempests
“The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk.” – William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness It is never so simple to say, “listen here, this is an exact depiction of mental illness,” as is it not simply the case in…
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Sixth Floor Paradise
After ascending a slew of concrete stairs, you reach this door. Throw your shoulder into it or else you won’t get it open. Once you do, though, you step through this threshold that separates the desolation of the staircase column from a plateau of peacefulness. You could turn to the right and trot into the…
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Fourth to Last Train Home
The hour was not incredibly late, but both parties were quite weary from their respective days’ toil. It had been a long, dog day of midsummer. They each carried aches in their bodies, but the weariness stemmed from elsewhere. There was a mental exhaustion at play, a soft drone humming on the part of the…
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Sophisticating the Rudimentary 