Stories
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Lamentations of the Right Girl Not Chosen
Every love story with three people requires someone to lose gracefully. She must be appealing enough for the choice to matter, decent enough for the audience to pity, and composed enough to disappear without contaminating the final embrace.
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Micro-Fiction Corner: A Neglected Wish Begging to Be Made
The well at the edge of the property had been dry for longer than anyone could remember. Moss softened the stones, the wooden crank had split down the middle, and the bucket hanging from it had rotted until only two iron bands remained.
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Cluck and Grunt
The diner had served the same breakfast special for longer than anyone could remember. CLUCK AND GRUNT remained written across the chalkboard above the grill in lettering polished smooth by decades of grease and steam.
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Moo Juice
The vending machine in the break room had always offered the usual assortment of soda, water, and an iced tea so unpleasant that abandoned bottles accumulated beside the sink.
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Micro-Fiction Corner: That’s My Hell
Everyone in the office had a private version of the phrase. A jammed printer was one person’s hell. Another reserved the expression for meetings scheduled after four. Someone in accounting used it whenever the microwave smelled like fish.
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Boys Night
They had been playing together since college, the same four men every third Thursday, carrying the same scarred card table through apartments, houses, marriages, divorces, and enough jobs to make the years seem less orderly than the game. The ritual survived everything.
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Gives a Body the Flesh Creep
My aunt used the phrase for anything mildly uncanny: a stranger holding eye contact too long, a house changing owners three times in a year, a song appearing on the radio while she was humming it. She said it lightly, almost cheerfully, and usually rubbed both arms afterward as though encouraging the sensation to finish…
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Full of Moist
The basement had always been damp. Boxes softened at the corners, door frames swelled every summer, and pale gray blooms returned to the concrete regardless of bleach, fans, or dehumidifiers. We called it the swamp and treated it as one more defect of an old house.
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Pretzel-Bender
The bakery opened in the narrow storefront that had once housed a shoe repair shop, and within a month people were lining up before sunrise. The attraction was supposedly the dough, although everyone knew the real reason.
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Micro-Fiction Corner: Whooperups
The old men on the porch used the word without ever explaining it, the way people do with weather, debt, or grief. They said the whooperups were bad this year, said you could hear them working the field edges after dark, low and rolling like something turning over in its sleep.