Old Tetrahedron Jim, straight out of the Eastern Bloc with a box for a head and a bag for a heart. A swaggering Bogart with egg cartons ‘neath his cassock like a tumored ninja turtle. Cassock being a gentle way to say muumuu, or tarp. The good tarp with the gilding that he wears outandabout [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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As I drove by in my mother’s 1970 mustard yellow Gremlin, I saw the six boys that I could always hear from my bedroom window. As the sun shown down bright like summer promised, the boys would toil in the driveway next to mine fixing up their cars. They were all bronze, not from any [...]

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The whole town attended the funeral for the man who nobody knew. They filed into the funeral home and didn’t say a word to each other. A maid found the man who nobody knew at the Motel 6, floating in the pool with a dragonfly sitting on his head. She called the police. The officer [...]

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East of town there are fields. And a tree, a lonely barn, two houses in the distance, and the sun changing from a dull glow to a bright pinwheel in the November sky. It’s eight AM on Friday morning and we haven’t yet slept. “I hate seeing the sunrise before I go to bed,” I [...]

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