Fiction
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Maybe There’s This Dragon?
Maybe I’ve been here too long. Maybe I’ve finally accepted that the apartment is somehow aspirational. Maybe there’s this dragon.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Summer of Families
“What do you think about this,” he said, measured and cool. “What if we offer a service where people can pay to be in our family, but only for a few hours.”
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Bob and Dave
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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Rumpus Original Fiction: Salt
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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Sunday Rumpus Fiction: One Small Victory
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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Saturday Rumpus Fiction: Three Short Stories by Sherman Alexie
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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Rumpus Original Fiction: How to Become a Tiger
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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Rumpus Original Fiction: April, 1968
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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Rumpus Original Fiction: State Facts for the New Age
“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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Rumpus Original Fiction: Mandarin Imperial
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…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Monkey Men
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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Rumpus Original Fiction: Rhino Girl
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.