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It could be better, it could be worse for Jemma Taylor, M.F.A. While most of her old grad-school comrades slave away as untenured adjunct professors, she fell into writing a gimmicky series of pa...

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The word is not the thing, of course, Korzybski, but the hope is that the word can at least gesture toward it. We use our words like B.B. pellets at a carnival shooting range, where one could nev...

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You must understand, I felt like a failure. Disappointed and lonely, didn’t know what to do. I’d accomplished all these things, made all these things but all I could feel was anxious emptiness. I...

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They say “necessity is the mother of invention”, and while that’s often true, it omits the part where necessity often also skips right past intention, how so many of our great leaps forward devel...

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At first, they were just thankful that there were no casualties and minimal injuries, all aboard able to walk away from the plane crash, probably due to the fact that sand dunes are far more forg...

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A lie’s just a story that won’t admit that it’s a story. A worst kind of story, an anti-story. I know for stories, they’re the only thing I’m any good at. Here we are within an age of lies, of do...

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The cliché is “Rome wasn’t built in a day” but what that chestnut neglects to say is that Rome didn’t fall in just one day, either. At its height, it’d become so vast and all-encompassing that th...

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Bruce Springsteen was born Bryce Sherrinford the Fourth, of the Kennebunkport Sherrinfords, graduated Yale, rumored to have been Skull and Bones president his senior year and only took on the wor...

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I was pulled from the earth by enslaved hands, in the beginning when I was just tufts of cotton, when all I wanted from life was to rise and spread seed, instead caught up with those men in the c...

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“Elective Cryogenic Hibernation”. That’s what the scientists called it. They’d theorized about it for generations, slowly evolving from whimsical fantasy plot-device (what was Rip Van Winkle othe...

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It all started when I died, which isn’t so strange, because everyone dies. Thing is, that’s where most stories end but where mine began. I was hauling cross-country, loaded with compressed gas, w...

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“That daring young man on the flying trapeze,” they sing up to me as I vault, they sing to me as I sign autographs after the shows, “flies through the air with the greatest of ease.” It’s nice an...

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I tend to not believe in the idea of “the muse” to get things done creatively. It’s part of the reason I don’t guard my smaller ideas, my short poems, comedy bits or one-off short stories with al...

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Dear Mr. Hemmingway, May we call you Ernest? Look, Ernest, we appreciate the work you’ve put in here but we’re going to have to pass on this manuscript as it currently exists. Your spare journali...

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The dinosaurs didn’t die out, not really, they just became the duck. Evolution doesn’t have a plan, it’s just whatever happens next and whoever has the genetic luck to accidentally survive. Our c...

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For a stretch of time in the early 20th century, the most effective treatment for advanced syphilis was to intentionally infect with malaria on top of the syphilis. It induced a high-fever that k...

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Some call it “ruins photography” or “ruin tourism” but the most vulgar term is also the most apt: “ruin porn”. Documenting crumbling infrastructures, in best case showcasing our abandoned but mos...

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The buggies in my furs, they sometimes hurt but they’ve been on there so long I can’t help but feel like they’re a part of me. They make me itch sometimes but when Momma goes off to work, I know ...

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I could get you anything, anything you wanted, within reason, with a certain value for the word “reason”. It was so easy, of course, when the requests were mostly just street-drugs, prescription ...

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The idea of taking on the rap personae of a grizzled gold prospector sounded ridiculous to me as well when my agent first pitched it, but as he was quick to remind, this business isn’t just about...

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“Last we tried this, we went about it all wrong,” She told you from behind the desk in Her sleek minimalist office, “investing so much in one messiah to save you all at once, as much Myself as ma...

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“What was he like in your timeline?” one asked. “Well,” the other whispered, “I certainly don’t remember him being this fat.” They thought I couldn’t hear them, but I could, every single word. M...

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Most of us don’t get to carefully choose our last words but he did. Most of us don’t die so neatly, it’s too sudden or we’re in denial or our minds too far gone from illness or fear to wax eloque...

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In the Realm of Possibility on the shore of Lake Whatweknow, sat a king within a castle guarded by a more-or-less probable moat. From the peaks of the Expectations to the low Despondent Sea, his ...

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We’d expected the Rapture to be fun, of course. We figured it would leave humanity without the sanctimonious stick-in-the-mud hypocrites and full-stop psychotics that’d ranted about it for the la...

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