Category: stories
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A Day for Eating the Poisonous Mushrooms
Today is a day for eating the poisonous mushrooms. A day for climbing the pole and finding out how high the voltage is. For flying above the storm and stepping out onto the clouds, For standing at Zion’s edge and answering vertigo’s call. This is the world? Two years strapped in a padded cell. Glimpses…
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Azar at the Fair
Azar set Kleitos Leonidas’ water – with its precise double helix of lemon and orange peel twined around four cubes of ice – on the small table between their two chaises. “I gotta say, boss, this is a great place.” He clambered into his own chair with an umbrella-topped Mai Tai. “I thought we were…
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Zosima Panopolis
Jordan was drawn to Zosima Panopolis from her first Mountain Pose. Who knew just standing could look so good? The flared black yoga pants and black tank top, the glossy raven hair cropped short except for a single scarlet micro-braid tossed over her left shoulder, the heavy black eye liner and burgundy shadow should have…
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Woods Woman, Part II
“Snow White.” The syllables spun forth from the king’s lips and onto her shoulders like an unwanted mantle as he stepped from his sleigh. Well, she wouldn’t have to wear it long. Regicide was a capital crime in the realm; if she were taken she could expect little more of her brief free life than…
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Woods Woman, Part I
The woods woman hated winter. Game was scarce and shy. Chill winds skittered beneath the door and seeped between the windowpanes. And though she cherished her solitude, weeks cooped up in a tiny cottage as blizzard after blizzard howled outside could drive anyone a little around the bend. There was another reason she despised the…
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Reflections, Part III
The morning after his courting of Sylvie, Kleitos Leonidas rose before dawn began to pink the eastern sky, turned off the lights she habitually left blazing all night to annoy her neighbors and threaded his way through the oaks to the lake’s edge. The moon had gone down some hours before and had anyone been…
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Wild Hunt, Part III
The brindle had been living alone with the Adam-children for six months when the fox hunters came. The Odin-daughter had passed on five seasons before and the Odin-son, lasting far longer than Cu Fail prophesied, three full seasons after that. He had warned the brindle of the Wild Hunt’s coming, but she had seen no…
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Epistemological Exercise
A branch of philosophy that investigates the methods, limits, and origin of human knowledge. A visual document of a moment in time: a cloudy eighth of May at approximately nine a.m. in Sand City, California when a singular number of crab husks littered the beach. What can be said about it? * * * These…
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Reflections, Part II
Sylvie should have been terrified at a strange man strolling uninvited into her house. But since she moved she’d suffered a scourge of frogs and a storm of owls, and he was handsome, and smiling in a manner a touch haughty but not at all malicious, and she found it hard to believe that a…
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Wild Hunt, Part II
Although she could no longer hear the Adam-daughter’s movements, the old black dog knew by instinct and subtle vibrations that she had risen in the early morning light. The Adam-daughter looked puzzled and tilted her head in the manner humans adopted for their ineffectual ears as she walked down the hallway toward the living room…
smallstonebuddha 