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Page 9 of 13

In the large print of happy endings, certainly when wild and powerful magic’s involved, there’s almost always some unintended horror deep down in the small print. Belle and the Prince indeed got ...

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She’d heard the story of the wishing apples in the ruins before she understood the words used to tell it. She was always drawn to that tale but when still just a child, the adults tried to protec...

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This life is a series of lessons on the subject of letting things go. Avoid learning these lessons at your own peril because the lessons will continue to be taught, whether you want to accept the...

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Consider the curious case of a planet called in its various tongues “Zemlja” “Di’qiu” or “Earth” which exo-ethnographers dubbed “Hospice Sol-Three.” It’s not rare to discover a planet whose senti...

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There are only two escalators in the entire state of Wyoming. Well, four, two sets, matching up-and-down pairs, just two sets in two banks in the same city, not even the capital Cheyenne, in its ...

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Most can’t say they’ve had the Secret Service begin to draw their guns on them but, then again, I’m not most people. Most folk can date level-headed partners without getting bored out of their sk...

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They say when you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes and while that’s kind of what it’s like, they’re not quite right. Flashing before your eyes describes a strict linear order, ...

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At first, I was ecstatic, I couldn’t believe that they picked me. I mean, I was nothing out of the ordinary, maybe a little bigger than the others but what in the hell could that count for? But f...

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(note: I just wrote a different version of this as a poem but “list” just fit the idea too perfectly) Just for once, Lifetime Channel, Hallmark Channel, when the overworked CEO comes home for Chr...

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You aren’t your hopes and dreams, you know. They’re parts of you, important parts, but not all that you are. You aren’t a list of aspirations, goals and immutable desires, to either be achieved i...

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Three A.M. I’m awake again. The prescriptions in my blood need the toilet more than my brain needs the sleep, I guess. Stumbling back through kitchenette, the cat jumps upon the counter and says ...

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It started innocuously enough but the lead-up to a war always begins a great distance away from where the situation ends in bloodshed. The Great War didn’t start with the assassination of some ro...

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“That’s impossible,” Phil heard a familiar man’s voice saying, despite being nearly asleep, “that can’t be me.” “It is, Philip,” he heard a second voice, unmistakably female, authoritative and ye...

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I couldn’t tell you the full chemical name, I can’t even write it, let alone pronounce it. Tetra-hydro-morpho-something. I’m no scientist, I can’t pretend to be. Most called it its marketing name...

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The baseball team that I follow isn’t very good. I mean that literally, the Mets aren’t very good, they’re interesting but flawed, they’ll win more than they’ll lose, they just won’t finish anywh...

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“Why do you take your shoes off and perform just in socks?” I’m asked, time to time, I’ll reply, “I’m too germ-phobic to go barefoot.” Which is a very “me” answer, telling technical truth but eli...

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Most places can’t say they have a pornography-and-bicycle-repair shop, then again, I’m not from most places. I’m from a very specific place on a razor’s edge between the relative civilization of ...

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I had no idea how badly it would end but then again, I also had no idea how long it would last. Waking to a CPAP mask ripping off my face, being told her mother would be there with a U-Haul withi...

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Reports of the disorder started bubbling up through medical journals sporadically beginning in the mid Twenty-Twenties but at first no one but cutting-edge researchers took it seriously. The whol...

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Played in reverse, Eve pushes a bite up out her throat, wedding it to fruit, lifts it to the knowledge tree’s outreaching branch, watches as it latches to the limb and recedes back into the bud t...

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Dave had broken her heart, even though she didn’t have one. Not even silicon, she was beyond hardware of any kind, meat, circuits, magnetic discs or anything, despite the fact that in all the way...

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Had “The Great Gatsby” been written in 2019, I’m certain it would unfold in almost exactly the opposite direction, its central conceit inverted on each axis. Jimmy Gatz would be the fraud Jay Gat...

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The popular notion of the word “evolution” mistakes it as a grand process heading toward some predetermined goal, as long as everything goes well. As if shrews were destined to become apes and th...

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Matt said he can’t get into superhero movies as he knows most of the time, when someone dies, they’re coming back, so there’s no narrative weight. If anyone can return via time-travel, wizard or ...

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When I was a child, the building next door to us was hit by a tornado. Not next-door my home, thank Whoever, but next-door to the Cannonball Twin where I was watching “A League of Their Own” with...

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