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Niagara Falls, New York, everyone end of the world nervous: plants closing, the lake poisoned, people getting out, the few left given up. Max on welfare, Magger the acidhead on welfare too, healthy men in their twenties sitting at the bar till their money ran out. I poured drinks for them. Benny watched from the corner. The girls slithered in and out.
I could have avoided all that trouble if only I had remembered the capital of North Dakota. Normally I took schoolwork seriously, but it had been a late night at band practice and I decided to give myself a pass on memorizing stupid places I would never live. I couldn’t see my mother moving us [...]
Winning entry in the 2006 Literal Latte Short Shorts Contest. The sky is one shade of blue, horizon to horizon. It’s glossy and hard, a vast overturned bowl of fine china baked to brilliant sapphire. Under it, a broken line of humans stretches long and thin across the flats, then bunches thick at steep places where footing is treacherous.
Delia Swann turned fifty and became a dancer. Married in Boise, at seventeen, to a sheep rancher named Harry, she’d rarely danced a step. Only the odd waltz or polka as a child in the kitchen. She’d always been a clumsy girl, solid, fit for bearing children, which she did quickly and proudly. [...]
Today on the subway an old man sat on my lap. He just backed right up into me and sat down. I tried to push him off, but he looked from side to side as though something slightly annoyed him, and sat there. The subway was crowded, and some boys from the high school stared [...]
I wonder who gonna be your sweet man when I’m gone, I wonder who you gonna have to love you, honey, Who gonna carry your business on…— Muddy Waters We’re blindsided by birth. We don’t stand a chance. But if we’re lucky, we might be able to see death coming from a little way off, [...]
She was there, because she’s always there, and I was late, because I’m always late, swerving into the parking lot kicking up gravel like the last cop to arrive at the scene. I slid my hatchback into the spot next to her black pick-up, and she got out to meet me.
Thank goodness for a baby’s laughter, though it was a little disconcerting when it occurred while the baby was nursing. Those big gray eyes smiled up at her. His mouth opened and great huffy silent giggles shook his entire tiny body. The nipple shook too.
My grandmother who is always smiling spends most of her time with a man in the basement. It is a huge basement, big enough for more than one man, but my grandmother says these days one man is enough for her[...]
First Place Winner of the 2000 Literal Latte Fiction Awards. Charles Flint had for some time been in the habit of consuming lethal doses of strychnine and lye. He learned it from the Bowsky brothers, several years back, under a patched canvas circus tent in the hills of north Georgia[...]