Story
Gizmo
Gary Indiana
(from Gristle Springs, a novel of intrigue)
In a detention cell at Gizmo, Umma Obikhan Khan, supposedly blind as the proverbial bat (having dwelt in many caves, the Umma knew well that bats are not at all blind, but simp...
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Story
Chapter 90 – Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
Samuel R. Delaney
Note: Inadvertently, Chapter [90] was left out of the printed version of the new novel by Samuel R. Delany, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. Insert it on Page 956. What is now numbered Chapter [90] becomes [91]; [9...
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Classics
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
Chapter One
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo
His father told him t...
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Story
Purple Heron of the Night
Raúl Serrano Sánchez
Claudio was only trying to make up for all the years he’d spent yearning for those legs, the ones he was always telling you about over coffee in the newly restored center of the old city, in one of those bars that’s supp...
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Story
The Cherub
E. A. Fow
On the way to rehearsal, Amy thought she saw something flit away. An afterimage lingered in her eye, pink and faintly glowing, but she couldn’t make out what it was. She didn’t think about it again until the next day, wh...
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Story
Tenth Between Fear & Trembling
Max Blagg
We lived one floor up from a woodworking shop from which the tools had long since been stolen. It was on East Tenth Street, way over almost to the river, a view of the smokestacks of Con Edison’s 14th Street plant painted ...
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Story
Looking Back: Anxiety’s Greatest Hits
Patrick O'Neil
San Francisco, June 24, 1997
I’m in a dark, trash-filled alley between tall brick buildings. Two men stand in shadows. I can’t see their faces. I hand one of them money and he gives me a balloon of dope. I look up, th...
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Story
Road Kill
Drew Hubner
In an alley on the fringes of the march, Glory stuffed toilet paper bits in her ears and got out of danger, whispering to the baby in her tummy, running deeper into the alley for safety.
Text me, she'd said to the fath...
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Story
Dear Satan
Tony DuShane
My prayer was answered. I found a Hustler magazine.
I often prayed to Satan for a Playboy to appear under my mattress. When the urge was strong and the need to see a naked woman was important for a decent pubescent sessio...
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Story
Bump Your Ass Off
Anna Mockler
We was going to be late if he didn’t hurry up, he was cutting it really close, and I was almost mad with Rudy if he was going to make us late for the end of the world at Coney. I looked at my Roylex and I said patient, it ...
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Story
New Bedford Real Estate
Amman Sabet
Usually, i tell people i’m from around Boston, but I’m not even from there. I grew up just outside New Bedford. It’s a port city on the South Shore that used to be big on whaling. You got lots of ugly Portuguese the...
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Story
Sodomy Is a Threat to National Security
Jesus Angel Garcia
COSTUMES
On Saturday morning at the KKK meetup, the hooded outfits came in a variety of flavors, from milky white to tea green. One guy wore a Confederate flag that made him look like a Southern-fried Statue of Libe...
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Story
Killing Williamsburg
Bradley Spinelli
RUMORS
It started like a whisper, a fall breeze through the drying leaves of September’s trees. We overheard words dropped like cigarette butts and unwanted taxi receipts, snippets of clandestine conversation inte...
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Story
Russian Graves
Larissa Shmailo
One of my favorite places in the world is the Russian Orthodox Cemetery in Spring Valley, New York, which is known as Novo Diveyevo. An Anglo, used to containing his dead in unrelenting grids of slabs of stone atop preternat...
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Story
The Forgetting of Water
Doug Rice
Mai struggles to experience the place of words in her body. The slow patience of her tongue, of her lips. The care she gives to each letter, the way each letter shapes her mouth. Each word changes her. This foreign tongue...
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