It’s 8:34 p.m., and an elderly woman has fallen down in her home. We take the stretcher in past the evergreen bushes, the mailbox, and the Christmas lights, blinking through the cold darkness their message of suburban yuletide greetings, as the ambulance’s lights frantically spin and light up the driveway. The door’s open, so in [...]

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Archimedes I
I woke up, looked at the clock to the side of my bed. It was flashing. The only information it gave was that the power had blinked off more than two hours ago. I looked at the letter beside the clock. No blinking on that front. It was pretty stationary. I laughed at the [...]

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The Upper Crust, is what the locals called it. A steady strip of flatly laid out ground, stretching out across a plateau and resting at the often frozen grounds of the North Country. There, in the Upper Crust, the ground was covered by trees much like an old man and his beard - full yet [...]

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Read Part I of “Midway” online here and Part II here.
The shock of finding over a hundred thousand dollars hidden in the bedroom ceiling temporarily got me out of the stupor I’d been in. I got an old army surplus duffel bag out of the cabinet under the bed and Shaun and I shoveled the [...]

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Like suede, the grass combed over the Irish hills of the Flinn Family Farm in a natural way, which looked inviting and warm. It was late in the day, which was one that had been drizzled upon four five hours prior to the boy’s chores. Both of the Flinn boys looked like their father - [...]

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Her words just hang there, festering in the room. The air…sticky with anticipation of the next note to fall. As he lies in the corner languidly dreaming of pumpkin pie and tornadoes a whisper sets in his brain.
“Don’t sit like that. They’re watching you.”
“Who is?”
“They are.”
“There are only four of us here.”
“Yeah, and all of [...]

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Part I of “Midway” was published in last month’s issue of the Ames Progressive. Read it online here.
Kate came home at five. I was dozing at the table, torn between passing out or nursing my anger and what was left of the bourbon a little while longer. I watched Kate step out of her purple [...]

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What if I had died last Thursday before reading Catcher in the Rye? I’d have never been introduced to Salinger. Never known that there is a God and he is made flesh and Salinger is Him. Would I have gone to Heaven anyway?
Good question. I have no idea. What were you doing last Thursday that [...]

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The House of Freaks was quite a letdown, let me tell you. The exterior was a big mural featuring all sorts of fantastical freaks, like a bearded lady who looked to weigh about 400 pounds and a lizard-headed man lifting a giant barbell with his forked tongue. The other three walls were unpainted plywood, held [...]

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“a short play”
There is a man and a woman sitting in a living room. The man is on one couch and the woman is on a separate couch.
The man: (repeatedly pointing and clicking the remote) Fuck—why won’t this thing work?
The woman: (painting her toenails) What won’t work?
The man: (tapping the remote with his hand then [...]

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