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PERSONAL LIFE #35 by Ulyses Razo

June 12, 2025 · Fiction

In 1983, when I was 32, I invited my Sorbonne classmate Renée Hartevelt to dinner at my apartment at 10 Rue Erlanger, under the pretext of translating poetry for a school assignment. I planned to kill and eat her, having selected her for her health and beauty, characteristics I felt I lacked. I have had a lifelong suspicion that people find me mentally and physically repulsive. However, many of those who meet me find me to possess obvious intelligence and a sense of humor. They also find me handsome, although of austere appearance. I am often regarded as “very self-analytic.”…

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ONE GIRL – ONE GIRL by Sacha Francis

June 11, 2025 · Fiction

She thumbs the tumor where it rubbed on the boning of her bra. Her work shirt is half undone, her chest exposed to the mirror. The hooks unclasp, and it’s there in full view: pill-sized, pill-hard and intradermal. She squeezes, this is no pimple – the skin that hides it turns a deeper pink and that’s the end of it. An intruder to the bathroom fails to enter, the door ruts the lock. She buttons her blouse and smooths out her hair to return to her work. The tumor snugged in its place over her breastbone, against the bra, beneath…

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I SEE THE BEAUTY by Diego Lama, Translated from Italian by Rose Facchini

June 10, 2025 · Micros

Behind the dune of plastics, hidden among the clumps of charred O-Rings and heaps of shapeless garbage, there is a large tank. In the tank are cockroaches. Every day, I climb onto the metal cover and contemplate the gray dawn that creeps through the hills of waste. Then I defecate inside the tank through the top hatch. Every day, my feces nourish thousands of hungry cockroaches. In the morning, I take my net and fish. The smell of the tank does not bother me. On the contrary. Sometimes I climb inside and catch the biggest cockroaches that hide at the…

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WHAT I DID FOR LOVE by Catherine Spino

June 9, 2025 · Fiction

I can’t remember his name so I will give him one. Devin. He was 32, blonde, sun kissed, and standing on a dock in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t tell what color his eyes were but if I had to guess, they were blue. I hit “heart” and a few hours later, I felt his “heart” back vibrate against my jeans. It was December 2014 and I was 21. Back then, the OKCupid app was clunky and I always gave out my cell because texting was easier. I gave Devin my number and his texts came in green on…

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LOOKING AND HURTING by Alice Rowena Wilson

June 5, 2025 · Micros

In the bar, she stares at him constantly, which is embarrassing in and of itself, but also because she cannot seem to physically control it, and she knows his friends will notice (she somehow does not count herself in this body of people, although that is where she belongs; within this crowd, her desire isolates her, carves out a space of hot, silent shame), and she knows that they, his friends, will murmur to each other, that they will note her desperate, pathetic, puppy-dog presence, but she seems to have a physical impediment that means she can’t stop staring, and…

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CRUISE STORY by Aristotelis Nikolas Mochloulis

June 4, 2025 · Creative Nonfiction

I was awake in what felt like an instant, a ray of sunlight splitting my head in half. Mom out of sight, I showered, redressed, packed my wet sheets into a bag, began to panic, and called her to see if I had it in me to tell her what was going on. In the few seconds between her picking up and my coldly replying, Where are you? I decided to give myself the benefit of the doubt until the second test. Outside the laundromat, I studied the manual, slid the swab deep into my nostrils, its tip into the…

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MY NAME IS JIM PARCHEESI OWNER OF JIM PARCHEESI’S AND I’VE WORN THE SAME PAIR OF SOCKS FOR 45 YEARS SO SUE ME by Dan Weaver

June 2, 2025 · Fiction

You’re gonna come in here into my place and tell me to change my socks you’re gonna tell me that? Get out of here with that horseshit. This is my place and these are my socks and I’m not changing them just because you don’t like that I’ve worn them these same ones for 45 years. I’m not here to do what anybody says to do I’ve earned it you see the fucking pictures on the walls of this place? There’s pictures of me with like several different celebrities ok? They came to my place here and they gave me…

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WHALE WATCHING by Kelly Dasta

May 30, 2025 · Fiction

My dead friend isn’t supposed to be on the whale watching tour. It’s a pale summer morning, the harbor glazed with fog. I’m standing on the boat’s upper deck directing tourists aboard, gesturing to empty seats, passing out pamphlets. And there she is, lined up behind a family of five. She’s wearing a navy windbreaker, jean shorts, and muddy white sneakers. Why are you here? I ask. You’re scared of the ocean. Only the Pacific, she says. The Atlantic is fine. I say, Okay, but don’t freak out the children. We jet off, gliding over the glass panes of the…

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WHISPERING GALLERY: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILL CORDEIRO by Rebecca Gransden

May 28, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

Will Cordeiro’s fiction unfurls a kindly finger and beckons you to follow an uncommon path. As you tramp along seldom visited trails, your mind wanders as much as your feet. You arrive at the peculiar, the disquieting and the mysterious, without a clue how you got there or even if you want to leave. With Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024), Cordeiro invites entry to an off-kilter world, where those who disappear into the mist entrust their steps to the uncertain ground beneath them. I spoke to the author about this curious collection. Rebecca Gransden: Some people claim that time isn’t…

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MIKE TOPP by Mike Topp

May 27, 2025 · Micros

TODAY Today a bully from my high school is coming by to beat me up one last time (he has cancer). AMERIKKKA Of course Amerikkka leads the league in serial killers. There are a great many serial killers in town right now—because of NYC’s favorable tax laws and enterprise zones and the big serial killer parade we have every year, and because in a lot of our restaurants serial killers eat free. A JOINER Here’s something you might not have known about me: I was a joiner in high school. Carbona Club, Whip-Its Society, Nutmeg Club, Friends of…

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