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I Am Santo

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Stucco and Stone

Wood and tile. It was all she knew. Wood and tile, stucco and stone. The night had pulsed long past late dusk, revelers waving their limbs about in heightened, feigned ecstasies they hoped might escalate and consume them, like dry brush waiting for fire. So many nights like this one over the years, evenings where […]

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Out Riding

His name was Carlos, or so he’d said. Min-jung honestly didn’t care. He was young, strong and beautiful and he believed her when she said her name was Areum, so all things being equal, he had every right to be Carlos, Juan, Victor or Pablo. She didn’t mind as long as he held her again […]

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One Way

Gail had lost the bet with herself, an irony not lost on her. Lev’s decision didn’t surprise, but it irritated her the way a stain did when soup was ordered instead of a burger to avoid dripping grease on a new blouse. Still a drop blemished. Had she known how quickly Lev was going to […]

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Anger Keep Out

Gasik stepped down the drop-off toward the water and breathed shallow, the sulfur of the pond stinging even against his effort. The place was a swollen lesion on the ass of the town; a chained-up, fenced-in, sign-posted swath of embarrassment that was the subject of children’s dares and adult’s dark grumbling. Gasik’s own child has […]

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What Creezus Knew

She’d listened to Gary long enough, but couldn’t let go. Even before coming here, Marla knew they were nearly done, her nights in bed by his snoring side becoming an interminable endurance test. They made love infrequently, life painting them into separate corners with its financial redecoration of who they’d been when they met four […]

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Hidden Ecstasies

Hands balled into fists, skin stretched white over bone, nails digging into palms as reminders the moment is real, the pain of flesh diminished in the face of the shocking black boiling inside. Undone memories, borrowed from the lives and whimsy of others, described and downplayed with indifference, yet indelible and stalking within dark stretches […]

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The Blank Hurry

It’s not a death, facing each day is breath and strength and captive attention to the slow creep of hours while assigned to responsibilities that perch like stone gargoyles on brittle shoulders. Weight is a rule, a crushing pressure extremities beg to remove, their tremble constant, surrounding an uncoiled stomach unable to settle under the […]

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Her Healing

Immune to the plague of discourteous minds, she is ever stronger than assumed, dousing the fires of unwelcome desire even as the walls closed in around her with hands groping, pressing, clinging to her new form. Unawakened, but left to navigate a world with wide, hungry eyes that pried at her, she shrunk away from […]

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An Exorcism

Her confessions rise like a billowing of smoke from her chest, sentient and reptilian. I draw them out of her, the bait for this hungry serpent that wants to continue drawing strength from her forever, but which is tempted by my caring manner and consideration. As she speaks of her past, it slinks into the […]

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Fire in the Void

iPhone 5 shotThis distant heart – radiant and reliable, a circle within endless cycles – demands response. Beheld in awe, mouths pull wide at the weight of it beauty, tears sting as hearts ache to understand its furious draw. To drift is to fight nature’s will, spitting in the face of laws that will desert […]

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