Tag: Fiction
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Mrs. Franklin’s Fourth Graders
“Do you dream in color? Or black and white?” Kenny asked Steve, looking from the edge of the Breckenmeyer Bridge. Both boys threw rocks and anything else they could find into the river below. The bridge spanned roughly a quarter mile and allowed one car at a time. But that was long before either boy…
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One Day in the Cafe
“It’s not that big of a deal,” she said. “I mean, I really. I didn’t. No, I didn’t really want coffee. Not really, anyway.” Ten seconds earlier, she held a precariously balanced iced vanilla latte between her philosophy textbook, a day planner, and a hand-me-down iPhone 13 from her grandmother. Unlike other twenty-somethings, she refused…
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Floyd Patterson and Janice’s Diner
Floyd complains about lukewarm coffee, sparking banter with Kathy in a slow-paced diner.
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From An 80-Year-Old Film
“Take my hand!” His lips mouthed the words. I couldn’t hear what the medic standing over me was saying, and nothing. I tried to get my body to work. It felt like a thousand needles in my fingertips, that same feeling you get when your extremities fall asleep. Or if you lay on your arm…
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Suzie’s Coffee Shop
“Right, right, right.” “Are you just agreeing with me?” “Why on earth would I do that?” “Um, I don’t know? To mess with me?” “Why would I want to mess with you?” I’d never seen this woman dressed in capris with red heels, a crème colored blouse, pearls around her neck, and a full-length thinly…
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The Unusual Sounds
You expect certain sounds in Tualatin in the evening. Cars driving over the pavement, catching every uneven section with a thunk-thunk. The acceleration and deceleration of semi-trucks, some shifting up or down. It all depends on their speed. Whether or not they catch the beginning or end of a traffic light’s cycle will determine the…
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Teaching English
For a spring day, it wasn’t that cold. The SEMO sweatshirt I was wearing kept me comfortable enough. Not too hot. Not too cold. Not just right. Adequate is more like it, but I could’ve cared less. Coming from an English class where the students thought they knew more than the instructor was scary.…
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What Would It Be Like
Thinking to myself, I wondered what it would be like. “Josh, I’m starting to think you might be a little bit, you know? Woohoo.” Travis put his finger to his temple and spun it in a circle, the universal sign of being insane. “That’s a little too out there.” “Why? Like you’ve never thought about…
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Church Ladies of Birchhaven
“What happened to Jennifer and Sarah? I thought they were friends.” After eating a light lunch at Pete’s Diner, Francis and Martha sipped their espressos. Both women were friends from the local Southern Baptist church, lifelong followers of Jesus, and very stuck in what they would say is their views of Christianity, regardless of how…
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Worse than Mount Vesuvius
“The shockwave itself would be greater than the sum of all the worst volcanoes we’ve ever seen in the last hundred years, Todd. Worse than the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii. It’s impossible from today’s physics.” “But there’s quantum theory. What about the possibility of everything, everywhere, existing in one plane…
