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Fiction

225 posts
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

Rumpus Original Fiction: Bob and Dave

  • Kamil Ahsan
  • February 10, 2017
The threat of perfunctory conversation looms. Raza reaches for his headphones, but it is too late. The man is already talking to him.
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

Rumpus Original Fiction: Salt

  • C. A. Carey
  • January 6, 2017
A flash-fire covered the horizon all around and behind her, and my mother glowed genuine blue. I saw her skeleton, or maybe her white-hot soul. Something flew up and around our heads.
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

Sunday Rumpus Fiction: One Small Victory

  • Ignatius Valentine Aloysius
  • December 18, 2016
Now he started to cry and couldn’t stop the tears. He’d found a way to beat his hunger until the next meal, and he didn’t know when that would be. Hunger, his acts from hunger, made him cry.
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

Saturday Rumpus Fiction: Three Short Stories by Sherman Alexie

  • Sherman Alexie
  • November 19, 2016
These are desperate times, and I'm not as desperate as a lot of people, but I'm desperate enough to need this job.
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

Rumpus Original Fiction: How to Become a Tiger

  • Katie Darby Mullins
  • October 28, 2016
Tigers are bigger than my comprehension. That’s what I want. I want to be bigger than I am, so big I can’t even imagine it, so real I can’t ever be misinterpreted.
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

Rumpus Original Fiction: April, 1968

  • Paul Justison
  • October 7, 2016
Used to see lots of psychedelic princes and princesses on Haight Street. Not many these days. But here were hundreds of the turned on and tuned in, dressed like birds and peacocks in heat.
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

Rumpus Original Fiction: State Facts for the New Age

  • Amy Sauber
  • September 2, 2016
“I’m a shock absorber for tragedy,” I say, not really knowing what I mean. “Maybe I should just move to Hawaii. I hear that’s a happy place to live.”
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

Rumpus Original Fiction: Mandarin Imperial

  • Elysha Chang
  • August 19, 2016
Growing up, I understood my father through observation, and I suspect that he understood me much the same way. I liked to think our love was purer that way. Like two stray dogs who found each other and are blessed enough to just get along.
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

Rumpus Original Fiction: Monkey Men

  • Chris Vanjonack
  • July 22, 2016
Still lying on the bed in the Wausau hotel room, I started counting ceiling tiles. From above the covers. Not under. Never under. I always feel constricted, under.
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

Rumpus Original Fiction: Rhino Girl

  • Taylor Brown
  • June 24, 2016
But these were not men, she realized. They were a cackle of spotted hyena, bright-toothed in the dark, and they were laughing at her.
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

Rumpus Original Fiction: On Documentation

  • Joselyn Takacs
  • May 27, 2016
What is it like to be you? he was always asking, in his way, and it seemed a stupid question then. I didn’t know. I could lie better than I could tell the truth. I hadn’t left yet.
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

Rumpus Original Fiction: Service Area

  • Matthew Kirkpatrick
  • May 6, 2016
Even though the summer customers were the worst, always impatient on their way west to the places of her dreams, she envied them.
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