I couldn’t afford to eat at restaurants very much, but Jonathan convinced me that we should try this new place called “Squared.”
“What kind of food do they have?” I asked over the top of my laptop screen.
“I don’t know. It’s something new – farm-fusion or something like that,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Whatever you want.”
He came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders.
“I want what you want, too,” he whispered, warming my ear and sending a jolt through my body.
I flushed with warmth and nuzzled into his cheek. I started seeing Jonathan after our class in post-modern poetry. He wasn’t the kind of guy I normally dated. He wore skinny jeans and fitted flannel shirt like they were a uniform, and his saggy knit cap was always on his head.…
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“During this time of misfortune and reflection,” Mr. Leitner said to his sister, Mrs. Box, “I have decided to become a writer. I have already written the name of my novel.”
“Vince! Vince, come here,” Mrs. Box called to Mr. Box. “I have just found out that my little brother is a serious author.”
Mr. Box entered the dining room, expecting to hear something. His raised shoulders and eyebrows asked for an explanation.
Mrs. Box said, “Tell us the name of your novel.”
Mr. Leitner, impressed with himself but trying to appear modest, said, “It is called ‘Something Happens to our Faces When We Get Older.’”
“Is it a crime story?” Mr. Box said.
“No. It is a philosophic novel. It considers the nature of being and the stress of the modern world. …
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Arthur Davis is a management consultant who has been quoted in The New York Times and Crain’s New York Business, plus interviewed on New York TV News Channel 1. He has advised The New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission, the Department of Homeland Security, Senator John McCain’s investigating committee on boxing reform, and testified as an expert witness before the New York State Commission on Corruption in Boxing. Over eighty original tales of horror, dark fantasy, magical realism, science fiction, speculative fiction, mystery/crime, and epic adventure, as well as literary fiction, have been published, with another two dozen as reprints. He was featured in a quarterly, single author anthology, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received Honorable Mention in Otto Penzler’s Best American Mystery Stories 2017. …
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To the Lot of You,
It has come to my attention that you desire that I explain, no, defend myself. I, the daughter of the multi-billion elite, found to be partying, sexing, drugging, and doing all manner of things many of you do without the same level of scrutiny. While normally I would tell you outright to go f*^! yourselves, an event occurred in my life yesterday that I deem worthy of international pop culture awareness. Hence my decision to post this publicly on your celebrity “news” website.
In high school, my parents hired a boy of 21 just beginning college to tutor me. In his presence, I did most of those things you accused me of then—I paraded around in my bath towel, played with the bits of hair that extended to his cheek, and attempted every manner of seduction.…
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It starts like threading yarn in a needle threading the vein
turning red pulling vocal cord blood and muscle
the things that grow in you like algae
blooming on a lake as blue as agate or turquoise—
do you want to be that lake? Maybe the granite beneath
it? The pull of iron the streams turning to rust?
You become flotsam on the shore:
driftwood pine needles blush herb and sunrise gore…
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I wrap them like fine china in layers
of old newspapers and bubble wrap
andstill I know that the moving man
will drop the box or hit a pothole
on that bad stretch of road heading
out of town and something will crack.
All spring I have watched song
sparrows readying their nest in the rotting
crotch of a birch tree, laying in twigs
and leaves and feathers, lacing it up
withstring pulled from the canvas
deck chairs, only to have the arborist…
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More than a stirring, more than a rag soaked in gasoline, these nights in the streets are about need.
It all gets televised, and television is about something else: a box or a flattened box, a profound stillness masquerading as movement.
No Future becomes a slogan, and then we move on. We live the No.
A billion smaller boxes. Little coffins for ideas.
There’ll be time enough for mindlessness. A spoon and a melting lawn gnome.
I want to inject my cell phone. Smart drugs. Traffic cones. Dunce caps. Safety orange. Blaze orange.
We gorge on that which muddies up the blood.
– Glen Armstrong…
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