Category: fiction
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Wisconsin’s American Zoo (WAZoo) Invites you to pet the meese
1 Tuesday I get a call from Boss to come down to his temporary office at my earliest convenience. Which means immediately. Boss’s office is behind Meese Trecks. It’s called this because Boss says the plural of Moose is Meese. So that’s that. The two Meese are finicky and prone to violence. By finicky I…
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Cadet Andrews
I heard my name called, and yet I didn’t answer. For if I did, I would only hasten that which I did not want to proceed. If I didn’t, damned if I do, damned if I don’t was the current colloquialism. The courtroom was as antiquated as I believed it would be. Old vids from…
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Backstreet Violations
There’s nothing sweeter than the quiet moments, early in the morning, before Lettie awakens. Peaceful and serene. I have my routine – hot coffee, peanut butter on toast, and the paper. I’ve been circling help wanted ads. Daily, for months. One of these days something’s gotta come through for me. For us. Lettie’s counting on…
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Pomegranate Wine
I arrived in New Orleans’s muggy dawn haze to see a team of men spraying last night’s vomit into the chunky gutters of Bourbon Street. Mucus water rushed down the drains like my romantic hopes for the city, leaving behind a beery stench and your troubled narrator, puzzled over where to begin. Following the example…
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Invisible Woman Eats Attention Span of City Dwellers
I was born an invisible woman in a life so long ago that I’ve forgotten everything but four things: that underwear matters, that it is impossible to crack egg shells in even lines, that you should never brush your teeth at 5am, and that soggy tortillas soaked in chicken broth taste epic. I live in…
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Beauty In Pain
We make plans and then due to our own ignorance, we expect them to work. Life doesn’t care about your plans. It doesn’t care if you have big dreams. It’s still gonna hit you right in the face. And when that happens, most people suffer amnesia, that is, they forget the beauty of their own…
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When vanity is otherwise the poor girl’s only virtue.
“They own every breath that we take. They pick each piece off our plate. They eat all flesh that we make. They run the whole of our fate. And they say it’s all for our sake.” -What we’re not supposed to sing outside. We’d all heard, for quite some time of course, about our master’s…
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THE EVOLUTION OF ECOLOGICAL ATTITUDES AS REPRESENTED IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS A comparative analysis of works in American literature reveals the evolving ecological attitudes of society as illustrated through the perceptions and values of characters in regards to the natural environment. Applying an ecocritical approach, elements from each work are examined in three categories to chart the evolution of ecological attitude; environmental…
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Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
Each time I teach a literature course, I ask my students some version of this question, “What is literature?” Often it’s a question they haven’t considered, and we usually end up discussing our class reading list versus some of the more popular novels they know of. This leads us to talk about why we are…
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Treasure in My Head
We hung suspended in dark misty space, cut off from the world by the roar of the engines and the rush of cold damp air. A few lights blinked and flashed below; big guns, perhaps. All-consuming was the bitter, enveloping cold; the skin on my face was numb and lifeless from the wind. Quite suddenly…
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The Secrets of Kraken Mare
Syllar glanced out the window and sighed. Today was not going to be a great day for harvesting oil. Seeing that he was on Titan, 790 million miles away from Earth, harvesting a resource that nations had warred over for thousands of years, how could any day be a great day for harvesting oil? It…
