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He nicknamed her “Autumn” and she thought it was adorable, she thought it was a reference to the dark brown of her eyes, the rust-red of her hair, her freckles like speckles on a half changed map...

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A labelscar is a word within a word. Or maybe it’s more of a word without a word. A labelscar is what gets left behind when a word has stood for so long that the world has changed around it but i...

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The communists shot Laika into space, just because they could, just to prove a point. This wasn’t for the science, of course, it was a dominance play, to show off to the world. They knew that she...

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“The hardest thing in your life is rarely something you do once or a handful of times,” she said, “no matter how difficult. Childbirth, killing in war, those take seconds or hours.” She allowed h...

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While you were sleeping, the spirit entered your room and sprinkled magic inspiration all over the keys, but the thing that did so was no muse, it was instead The Devil himself. Or herself, somet...

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We always talk about how long we get to live but we so rarely talk about how long we’re going to be dead, a number so close to infinity that it’s functionally indistinguishable from the infinite ...

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There aren’t enough books where the mystery writer tries their hand at detective work and turns out to be terrible at it. There would be more of them, I reckon, but few crime novelists would care...

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If we are lucky, very lucky, this life will have been as if it were a trip to some grand amusement park when we were children, so well-themed and so immersive we could have all sworn that it was ...

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“I am what I am and that’s all what I am,” the old sailor muttered, half to himself, half to no one, “and I guess what I am is tired. Just tired.” He still clenched that corn cob pipe between his...

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One of the most common ice-breakers is that eons-old question “if you could go back in time to anywhere in history, where would you go?” and while in theory it can be telling, in practice, the an...

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When I was a little boy living in a little place, the television served as my only connection to the larger world I longed for and my ability to distinguish between reality and fiction was tenuou...

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SiestaWare, a name both silly and obscure in reference, which cosmically aligns, goofy and oft forgotten such as it is as well. SiestaWare was named after FiestaWare, a line of vibrantly-hued art...

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“You could wish for infinite wishes, child, of course you could,” according to the owl that lived there for as long as anyone could ever remember, “but that wish would just turn you into another ...

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It’s a tragedy you could set your wrist-watch to, if people still wore watches: with the release of each new Jurassic Park film, there is the inevitable wave of families across the country adopti...

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The Thin Mint Blizzard isn’t “exclusively” at Dairy Queen, no matter what the ads on teevee say. Anyone can put ice cream in a blender with mint-chocolate cookies. Branding means nothing. A brand...

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In the oeuvre of “Dungeons and Dragons”, there are six statistics you build your little imaginary dark-elf murder-hoboing Cthulhu-indentured warlock around: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Cha...

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You have to see it from my point of view, that guy was just depressed for depression’s sake. Just to wallow in it, just because being sad made him feel special and deep. Lenore had been gone for ...

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“Hope is the thing with feathers,” she opined, without attribution to Dickinson, as this customer wouldn’t know who Emily Dickinson was. “Hold your hope close to you,” she continued in stark devi...

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Charles Bucket peaked in his early tweens, somewhere in the first couple of years after he won that chocolate factory. Well into middle-ages, everyone still called him “Charlie” except for his em...

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Lot’s wife had a name, just like anyone else, any god or person through the ages, it’s just that the people who wrote it down didn’t think it mattered. Didn’t think she mattered. Too for Job’s wi...

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At the western edge of town, there’s the first gas station headed in or (more likely) headed out, the Dawn Mart, open five A.M to midnight, for all your lottery or beer or milk or beer or gas or ...

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There’s a saying “not all who wander are lost”, some people think it’s from the Grateful Dead, others think it’s from Led Zeppelin and in their ways, both are close, but it’s from Tolkien, old Jo...

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Necessary errands of some kind or another drag you out into the world, near the beginning of the end of some terrible thing that’s nowhere near over but just close enough to an ending where you k...

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He didn’t understand the phrase “peace and quiet” as if the two were somehow a set, somehow entangled, maybe even one and the same. To him, there was nothing peaceful about quiet at all, in the s...

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A CASE OF KILLER BE KILT “I need someone followed,” demanded a diminutive man in sensible slacks and utterly moderate shoes, his rage counterbalanced by that most rationalizing of influences, fea...

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