Story
Santa Barbara–1980 / San Francisco–1982
Matt McLaren
Santa Barbara–1980
I didn’t have a mattress yet. it had been three months, but I still lay in my room on my dirty clothes, arranged under a fitted sheet. Ron stood in my doorway, leaning against the jamb. He stared at...
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Art
Love and Strangulation
Carl Watson
The philosophers of the old romances say, and many specialists today concur, that desire is nothing more than the result of a necessary and continuous projection of the self into others; an unattainable wholeness is represen...
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Story
Welcome to All the Pleasures
Robert C. Hardin
My father liked to say that I’d always been impossible to find. During birth, he recalled, I couldn’t be extracted with forceps. No one could see me, so I made my own way out of my mother. The midwife only located me aft...
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Story
Code of Violence
Thaddeus Rutkowski
On the subway, I see a boy who is about 10 years old; he’s with his father. Both of them have red hair, but the boy has Asian features—a round face and pointy eyes. His father has a long face and Western eyes. Maybe this...
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Story
The Storm
Peter Blauner
He liked to have his house in order, which was why he’d never had a family or pets. He liked his routines and there was nothing wrong with that. Every day in the summer months, he wore his father’s old Fire Department wi...
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Art
Sensitive Skin 13
The Editors
Presenting Sensitive Skin 13, the Crime Special, featuring a multitude of criminally insane artists and writers.
Sensitive Skin 13 features original fiction from Peter Blauner (Slow Motion Riot, The Intruder), Thaddeus ...
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Story
Mesrine
Jacques Mesrine (translated by Catherine Texier & Robert Greene)
In late February 1972, all my friends finally ended up in block 2. The winter was harsh. We had more than three feet of snow. Right away, Jean-Paul Mercier became a close friend. We saw eye to eye about everything. I knew he...
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Evergreen
The “I Love Everbody” Tour Diaries
Maggie Estep
Last year, shortly after Maggie's passing, we published part one of her tour diaries. Here's part two of her adventures with Hole, The Beastie Boys and more, from Sensitive Skin Number 11, which we dedicated to Maggie.
Oc...
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Story
Lambs to the Laughter
Anonymous
I have the kind of mind that would kill me if it didn’t need me for transportation.
In this case to Ireland.
I had no conscious desire to go anywhere near the place but somehow I found myself sucked into the subway,...
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Story
Afro-Surreal Excerpt
D. Scot Miller
Let me tell you how I met Sham Black.
West Virginia, Dunbar Jr. High School football field, 123rd Annual Commode Bowl, Riverside Rats versus The Hillside Rams.
photograph by Kym Ghee
Every Thanksgiving morning...
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Story
The Year of Our Lord Quetzalcoatl
Margarita Shalina
The morning of the first day in the Dark Zone, I wake, still dreaming in black and white. I am Joan Crawford. I am Mildred Pierce. In the black of night, a storm is raging. I am in a bungalow by the ocean. The white foam wav...
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Story
The Earring
Alan Kaufman
I first saw the gold crescent of renegade freedom dangling from the lobe of a nameless hairy hippy Goy, his scrawny, insolent neck bound by a red bandanna. He leaned with outthrust hip of impertinent American coolness agains...
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Evergreen
Ballad of a Lousy Husband
Joshua Mohr
I should probably tell you more about the night Blue pushed me off the bar because that was really when our marriage ended. Sure, we stayed together another nine, twelve, maybe fifteen months more, but nothing was ever goo...
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Story
Caravaggio, Baby
Deborah Pintonelli
I have a date with Henry Henderson. We worked together one long summer canvassing for Greenpeace. Yes, I was one of those annoying young people who stop you on the street when you are rushing to your next appointment. He was...
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Story
1971
Celia Farber
Anyway I had a goldfish, a common Woolworth’s goldfish, which I brought home in a water filled plastic bag, and somebody, a man named Rick, I think, who worked for my father, said it would be safe to place him in a concret...
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