short-stories
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The head of the tornado is a wide, open mouth—swallowing clouds, light, dust,the stray wing of a passing bird.Some things fall in gently;others are ripped from their roots.Where it touches down,the finger of God stirs the world—a chaos that is also a kind of order. This house is taken, that one spared.The path seems random,unless
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from Brown and Black Days Well, it’s tax day. Sort of. Everyone knows tax day as April 15, but if you’re a live-by-the-edge, self-employed, always-worried-because-maybe-you-did-something-wrong kind of filer, then October 15 is the day you know you have for your extensions to be filed. But even that anxiety is relative. One day taxes are in
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Morning came like a pothole at sixty miles an hour—sudden, jarring, and hard to blame on anyone specific. The rooster down the road, probably unionized by now, took turns with his feathery co-conspirators alerting the neighborhood that the sun had clocked in. Matt rolled from his stomach onto a suspiciously angled hip and blinked at
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not just one day.. “The Walk Down Gravel”for Mr. Graham, Vietnam Veteran It’s Sunday.The grass glistens with dew—tiny glass beads strunglike prayers along every blade,hydrating the earthfor the coming summer heat. Across the street,Mr. Graham’s black trash can stands at attention—a quiet salute to the curb,ready for duty.Only, it’s not trash day. Tuesday is the
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“The snow fell soft as memory, blanketing the world outside, while the fire within whispered her name—Jacklyn, the spark that never fades.” The last-minute bustle had swept through town like a fevered wind. Shelves at the local grocery stood barren, picked clean by hands clutching canned goods and bread. Firewood was hauled indoors in armloads,
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“The life that I have known is gone, but in its place, a strange new music plays.”— Adapted from W.H. Auden His head bobbed gently, resting against the cold windowpane of the train as it carved smooth, silver lines across the waking landscape, steel wheels humming beneath steel tracks. Dawn crept in slowly beyond the

