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Fiction

225 posts
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  • Fiction

Rumpus Original Fiction: The Photograph

  • Gladwell Pamba
  • January 22, 2024
Over time, I detested how the woman jealously occupied his heart so that no other woman ever stepped into our lives or our house.
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  • Fiction

Rumpus Original Fiction: Hóngmén Banquet

  • Alice Evelyn Yang
  • January 8, 2024
“This is a homecoming,” he’d announced to the girl who took the order, “don’t let our mouths or cups go empty.”
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  • Fiction

Rumpus Original Fiction: Pulmonary

  • Avra Margariti
  • December 18, 2023
If I stand in the middle of my home and wingspan my arms out, I can touch the insides of my mother’s left lung, wall-to-wall.
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  • Fiction

Rumpus Original Fiction: Loss

  • Josh Denslow
  • December 11, 2023
I thought about that Chupacabra at the farmhouse, ripping those goats to shreds. He was my fucking hero.
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  • Fiction

Rumpus Original Fiction: Get Gone

  • Charlie Napolitano
  • December 4, 2023
Every customer with perfect lipstick and a hard-lined face reminded me of Mom. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a year.
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  • Fiction

Rumpus Original Fiction: Let All Our Ghosts Depart

  • Meghana Mysore
  • October 23, 2023
This is what beauty was, she said. This is what beauty made you into.
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  • Fiction

Rumpus Original Fiction: A Note to Say Hello, I’m Here

  • Abigail Oswald
  • October 16, 2023
“I don’t know why the hell he chose to live here, of all places. Sometimes it feels like the loneliest city in the world.”
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  • Fiction

Rumpus Original Fiction: She Walks in Fields of Light

  • Sarah Royston
  • October 2, 2023
I don’t know if she’s dangerous, or crazy like they say. But in this deadening place, she’s the only live wire.
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  • Fiction
  • Other

Rumpus Original Fiction: The Dollmaker

  • Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal
  • September 25, 2023
Sakshi can lay me over her workbench, unstitch my skin, stuff me with fur, and then sew me. She can weave her magic into me. Make me not be myself anymore.
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  • Fiction

Rumpus Original Fiction: Storytellers

  • Abhigna Mooraka
  • September 18, 2023
The first thing I learn is that storytelling is a strange art. Listening to stories all my life has not, in any way, prepared me to tell my own.
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A man with an oxygen tank cooks at a stove
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

Rumpus Original Fiction: Dream People

  • Kate Brody
  • July 24, 2023
I am embarrassed by how it scares me, getting older. By how the fear has guided every decision. By the math I’m always doing in my head, working back from fifty-two. If I die at the same age my dad died, Brody will be twenty-six, which is old enough.
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  • Fiction
  • Rumpus Original

From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: The Anniversary

  • Cathy Mellett
  • July 3, 2023
There lay her gift, basking in the sunlight. A gray-green lizard the size of a shoe. It stood so still she thought it was fake.
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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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