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Maggie is an expectant mother in a state that grants personhood at conception and protects the child’s rights over those of their mother. The world changed when I wasn’t looking. That’s what it felt like, my eyes blurring while I scrolled. If I tried to unplug and walk away, the gas flame of my […]
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Mom gave me a block of cheddar cheese and a sleeve of Fig Newtons when I left home for California in August of 1983. Apparently back then, when crossing the country alone in an unreliable foreign car, it wasn’t money, a map or even an old blanket, but foodstuffs from home rolled up in a […]
Nature is a haunted house — but Art — is a house that tries to be haunted. -Letter excerpt, Emily Dickinson, 1876. Chilled Autumn air settled over me, the dryness of it tickling my lungs. I walked down the dirt path, overtaken by tree roots and layered with crisp, fallen foliage. I kept my […]
323 Juneberry Way, Deptford, NJ 08096 (856) 848-0501 Lmanfredo@comcast.net In certain places there exists a permeating pointlessness to life with an aura of despair so acute that its inhabitants come to be unafraid, or, at the very least, indifferent to the inevitability of death. Camden City is just such a place. Camden is a […]
Waythorn, on the drawing-room hearth, waited for his wife to come down to dinner It was their first night under his own roof, and he was surprised at his thrill of boyish agitation. He was not so old, to be sure—his glass gave him little more than the five-and-thirty years to which his wife confessed—but […]
You got it wrong, son. You exaggerated the wrong things and failed to exaggerate the right things. I know you’re supposed to know your business, but you wrote your story from a long way off and tried to make it sadder than it was. In your story, I shoot myself. I know you meant well, […]
Two people came through the double glass doors of a twelve-story brick building and walked along the chain link fence to the parking lot. The tall, gray-haired man guided the short, white-haired woman by her elbow, urging her into a more energetic pace. Their heads were canted forward at the same watchful thrust, and anyone […]
“Win, win, win, win, win, win, win!!” was the incessant cry of our stepmother Sophie. It was the command that drove our household. She was a slight woman with a turned-up nose and a perky hairdo and the figure of a former Miss Alabama, which she was. She smoked Salems from dawn to dusk. We […]
That winter, like every winter before it, my father woke early each day and turned up the thermostat so the house would be warm by the time my mother and I got out of bed. Sometimes I’d hear the furnace kick in and the shower come on down the hall and I’d wake just long […]
It all started when Cletus Jefferson asked himself “Why aren’t all blind people geniuses?” Cletus was only 13 at the time, but it was a good question, and he would work on it for 14 more years, and then change the world forever. Young Jefferson was a polymath, an autodidact, a nerd literally without peer. […]
“This isn’t the one,” she said, laying her hand on my arm. As if she was really sorry. “Stick a fork in me. I’m done,” I said. “No. You’re just upset. You thought this was the one.” “I can’t do this anymore.” “It’s only one house. Maybe the next one.” “It’s seventy-three houses,” I said. […]
For three years, lifetimes ago, I was an office manager at a credit agency. During those years, with one exception, I never fired anyone. Probably this was because everyone quit first. The pay was miserable, there was too much work for any person to do in any given position, and my superior was an aimless […]
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