Category: Stories
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High School Friendships and Other Dangers
Roberta Beary
My daughter’s finally made a friend. Tara, in her new school. She doesn’t know her well. Doesn’t know anyone well. Tara is an only child. Her father is an orthopedist. The mother works part-time in his office. And when she’s not working, I’m not sure what she does. Perhaps sits home and drinks. I hope…
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Apricots
Joe P. Squance
Jimmy tunes my drums and talks to me about apricots. He’s been eating a lot of them lately. He tells me they’ve been great for his eyes and have improved his digestion, which has been knotty since he stopped doing drugs. He tells me they’ve cleared up his skin, and I can’t help it —…
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The Comeback
Lyndsie Manusos
It wasn’t long before a hole appeared outside of our research station on the ice, and animal ancients began climbing out, beseeching newness. We watched from the windows, inches thick to prevent the cold, as a 1,000-pound ground sloth emerged, slow as the days are long. It used claws as handholds and footholds to hurl…
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Famous Fish
Joe Bohlinger
He’d missed an email. It was their fault, really. The actor’s manager hadn’t marked the message with one of his usual headings—URGENT, IMPORTANT, SIGNIFICANT. It got buried underneath the other hundred emails Blake received daily, and he didn’t see the instruction to swing by Petco before the party. By the time he got the call…
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The Cabinetmaker’s Apprentice
Curtis VanDonkelaar
In the town of Grand Rapids much of the country’s glorious furniture was made. Chairs and tables, cabinets and desks, beds of metal, stools of wood, articles formed from materials that people from other towns didn’t know and couldn’t name. The furniture makers of the river city built with enchantments, with charms and what could…
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House Haunters
Joshua Jones Lofflin
House #1 has potential. Good bones, the producer tells you. Just needs a dash of paint, granite countertops in the kitchen, some stainless-steel appliances. Scrape off all the popcorn ceiling and tear up the carpet that smells like 1986. But first the crew takes shot after shot of a stain that’s spattered across the living…
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Hell of a Game
Becky Robison
I had to go out with him, no question—the same way I’d have gone out with an astronaut or a cowboy or a bank robber if their profiles had popped up on the dating app first. A real character. Next to the miniature briefcase symbol below his name: Official Mascot for the Night Creek Nocturnals.…
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Four Horses
K.R. Segriff
Bogdan slices diagonally across the patient’s eyelid, precisely following a marker-drawn line. Milo sits across the table, a mirror image of Bogdan in every way. Same green scrubs, same wide-set, black eyes, same assiduous expression directed to the patient’s face. “Who is this one?” asks Milo as he retracts the newly liberated flap of flesh.…
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The Uncrossing
Maria Poulatha
“Who left his hands like that?” my brother asks, pointing his chin toward the skeletal remains that protrude from our Father’s dark suit cuffs and lie neatly folded across his chest. “The funeral home,” I say. “He looks like a sea otter floating peacefully on his back,” sighs Alicia. My brother brought his new girlfriend…
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Lost Polaroids from Locust Hill
Mark A. McCutcheon
Population 1303. Drive into town on a foggy night and the headlights dance like horses. The variety store cashier speaks only in lines from TV sitcoms. Last year’s drought left over a hundred dead locusts per crunchy square foot. Puritans have run the Optimists’ Club for five generations. Zeke’s Antiques sells mantelpiece knickknacks, but everybody…
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Burgerpunk 2077
Sean M.F. Sullivan
In the world of tomorrow there was one rebel who maintained the roads connecting workers and hamburgers. See him now, in his raggedy white pick up chugging along the endless freeways with his toolbox, the engine powered by vegetable oil that leaked and stained the asphalt El Dorado gold. He flowed with the stream of…
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The Smell of the Air was Sweet
Marilyn Parr
Sugar work takes place in the basement kitchen, a long, dim room in the bowels of the old house. The others are apt to complain of the gloom, but I like the severe wooden paneling and wrought iron fittings. For it seems to me that any material as dour as walnut wainscoting must surely know…