Fiction/Nonfiction: fiction
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Trogloxene
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In a voice too low to wake anybody
A family member spiraling into depression and despondence, neglecting himself and his dogs. She again uses the second person as the point of view, and again things don’t unfold the way you expect. This one has a grim undertone of mental illness and loss, and the last paragraph, and the way the narrator’s voice evolves…
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The Bread of Life
It starts as an expression of gratitude, told in the second person, and things get weird in a hurry. To say more would be to spoil it. It only takes a couple minutes to read, but will probably cost a few hours of sleep, trying to forget.
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Go To Hell
I thought I knew what hot was. Humidity I could swallow. The wings of dead fish flies going translucent in the sun. Sprinkles melting off my ice cream cone the second I walk out of the shop. There is no ice cream here. There are plenty of dead things, but they are not stiff and…
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The Good Sport
In any social group of women, there is often one member whom the others dislike, not because she has done anything wrong or caused offense but simply for her inability to camouflage her weakness. If she is lonely and makes her loneliness known, that will be a mark against her; if she is afraid of…
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Final Ingredient
The first sentence is all you need for a hook: “Dinner service is such a rush that it takes us a while to notice the dead cook.” It’s another sub-5 minute read that might haunt your dreams, or at least your next meal out.
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Possession
I don’t believe that my husband is dead. The dead cannot walk, but every night he shuffles into our bedroom and lies down next to me, swamping me with his exhale of stale corpse air, breathing with lungs that I know are as black and wrinkled as rotten plums. His smell cloying like the flowers…
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Camera Obscura
A young woman’s boyfriend takes her to a party full of his old friends. The host, Sam, is a girl, and it’s unclear if the boyfriend deliberately withheld that fact.