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Understand Blue Falls, how it got its name, how in dry years, in autumn, water slips over a flat edge, sheer and perfect, a wide liquid sheet reflecting a clear day—blue as an unraveling bolt of satin. But most years are not dry and most days are not completely blue. Not this morning, certainly, as […]
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We have all these favorite shows coming on every evening. They say it will be exciting and it always is. They give us hints of what is to come and then it comes and it is exciting. If dead people walked outside our windows we would be no more excited. We want to be part […]
It began in a hailstorm in 1975 when Benito Picone trotted across Market Street with his briefcase gripped overhead, shielding him both from the falling sky and, inadvertently, the oncoming Buick. His legs buckled on the hood, his shoulder smashed a spider web into the windshield, and his arms pin wheeled as all 296 pounds […]
Soldiers of the G.A.R. stand alongside the tracks. They are General Dodge’s soldiers, keeping the tracks maintained for the Lincoln Train. If I stand right, the edges of my bonnet are like blinders and I can’t see the soldiers at all. It is a spring evening. At the house, the lilacs are blooming. My mother […]
I woke up shaking, alone in my room. I was clammy cold with sweat; under me the sheet and the mattress were soaked. The sheet was gray and twisted like a rope. I breathed like I had been running. I couldn’t move for the longest while. I just lay on my back, spread-eagled, looking up […]
I met the first man as I was going home from a dance at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall. I was being taken out of the dance by my two good friends. I had forgotten my friends had come with me, but there they were. Once again I hated the two of them. The […]
Anders couldn’t get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. He was never in the best of tempers anyway, Anders – a book critic for the weary, elegant savagery with […]
The first time, he was fishing with Danny. fishing was a sacrament, and therefore, after the strike, when his head was clear, there was the blurry aftertaste of ritual: the casting of the spoon in lazy repetitions, the slow cranking, the utterance of the clicking reel, the baiting of the clean hook, and the cosmic […]
While attending military boarding school as a young cadet, Edgar Allan Poe (1800-1849) was coerced to set the books he owned on fire in order to keep warm. Later in his life, a very poor man, he worked as an editor, consuming his energy in odd jobs. Poe, who was born in Boston and who died […]
Lore Segal is an American novelist, translator, teacher, and author of children’s books and a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was born Lore Groszmann in 1928 in Vienna, the only child of solidly middle-class Jewish parents. Shortly after Hitler’s annexation of Austria, she was one of a group of five hundred […]
Sharon Roznik has been a storytelling journalist for more than 30 years. She writes for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. She loves British Shorthair cats, NPR and researching her European roots.
Hilary Sigismondi was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Mother of two and grandmom to one. Loves writing Flash stories and playing scrabble. Budding improv goddess.
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