The year cancer floods my grandfather’s lungs I unspool myself on the dinner table and let my body decay in the open air I wring my hands in blood write his name glowing sangria on my skin take it all in, fist-first, fire-spitting-hair-flaming-first Sinew by sinew I watch myself rot and decompose into wooden earth […]
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We’ve seen it before time and time again. The doomed love stories. I suppose there is a strange pull toward the idea of sitting in a big group with tears streaming down your face and leaving feeling as if your insides have been scooped out and dumped in an unknown location. I am no exception. […]
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This story is one of the April Writing Challenge entries chosen to be a featured story. . He couldn’t cry for months. Not “didn’t” but “couldn’t.” To him, the difference mattered, even if it didn’t to everyone else. It had baffled him in the days following The Call; bothered him after a week passed, then […]
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Dear Cancer, I never wanted to talk to you. In fact, if possible I never want to hear your name ever again. Not in the campaign for awareness, not from the mouths of my relatives and friends, not from that MCR song that Twenty One Pilots covered, not even from myself. Yet I write to […]
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Trevor sat on the worn dock, dangling his toes into the water and looking at everything but the girl beside him. “Stop that,” Lilly said. She peered into the Ziploc bag between them and pulled out a piece of chocolate cake. That was the way he had met her so many years ago—sitting by that […]
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This is one of the February Writing Challenge entries that was chosen to be a featured story. Scarlett was perhaps the most terrifying person that Ben had ever met. She stood at her locker, red scarf wrapped loosely around her neck, as she packed her oversized backpack with large textbooks. He breathed a sigh […]
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In a general sense, everyone loves mail, don’t they? Maybe we don’t care for the sight of student loan due dates piling up on our computer desk or the sight of yet another credit card approval when we haven’t even applied for one in the first place. Still, nothing compares to the feeling of opening a […]
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“Her Smile” is one of the July Writing Challenge entries that was chosen to be a featured story. I felt the hay against my feet and legs. I was lying with my neck on a thick wooden beam that separated the different sections of the stable. It wasn’t the most comfortable position, but for the […]
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When the headaches started again you offered Ibuprofen and understanding and drawn shades. When a train wreck woke me in the middle of the night, you broke out the Valium and Percocet and told me not to cry because that makes it worse, then held me till I fell into an ocean of quiet. Prescription […]
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