Rumpus Original Fiction: All Good Things Come to an End
I didn’t feel bad about lying because the truth would have hurt her.
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Posts Tagged: short story
Rumpus Original Fiction: Marnie Marie Lit a Match
The only way to guarantee a secret is for the only person to know about it be you.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Wisdom”
“The devil has made a fool of you, but do you know Wisdom is at work, too?”
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Earth Revolves around the Sun
I imagined myself from the outside: the picture of a woman waiting.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Today, You’re a Black Revolutionary
The important thing to remember when climbing a pole, a rope, a mountain is to not look down.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Lacking World
I acted childishly. But, in my defense, it was childish only if we actually lived in a world where Shakespeare had never existed.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: She Hated the Child
She didn’t want anything to change. She understood it would be easier if she loved the child. But she did not want to love it.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Drink the Wine That Moves You
Were they all just kittens, really, the comfort of their warm blood the only defense between life and a dump in the river?
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Of Birds Alit in Trees
Her name is Selvakumari, but the name catches like a vine in the family’s mouth, comes out bungled and limp. They call her Sally.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Even the Moon
When you finished, several minutes passed before we spoke. You dipped a finger in a pool of candle wax. How could I know this was the only real secret you’d ever kept?
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Handsome Cab
A warm wash of confidence came over me. You don’t really know who you are until you know which car you’re following.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Rebecca
Grace shook her head, surprised by both her reluctance to speak and her impulse to lie. She had seen many photos of Rebecca.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Typhoon is a Hurricane
She tried her best to be clinical, but his dreaming scared her, made her think of ghosts and aswang stealing pieces of her—little bit by little bit.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: No Good
The sounds that she would expect here are entirely absent. There are no cries, no weeping. Just soothing, muffled tones.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Seasonal Work
[T]he thing about Gary was that he could believe what he needed to believed when he needed to believe it. So, technically, he never lied.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: City of Foundlings
What makes him think she’s in any less pain? Because hers isn’t prolonged by uncertainly, isn’t moored by hope.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: My Name Is Jean-Pierre and I Am Still an End Table
I am glad to be free of that tyrant, even if it means I am an end table waddling inch-by-inch down this path on a foolish mission that might prove impossible. I may be an end table, but at least I am free.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Whole World Is Desert
This is what I want him to think of me. The girl poised to surf a wave under the heaviness of the full moon, the ocean around her radiant with light.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Mutual Exploitation
There was a lot one could see about other people, when those people didn’t see them.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Emergency Lifeboats: 24 (12 on Each Side)
“What’s a six-letter word for ignoring truth,” she might say, without looking up from the puzzle.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Zhiyu/Jerry
Here is the genuine article: a young, American man, who expects the things he wants to come quickly, with just a word, a smile. So be it.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Pet Store
The boy is looking for something specific. I can tell. It shows on his face when he scans the shelves and doesn’t find it.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Barbecue
Up close, the beach was disgusting and tragic. A million tiny pieces of plastic were heaped on the shore like confetti from a hundred parades, or like the real sand on the beach threw up.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, a story at Smokelong Quarterly instructs us on how to become a new person. The title of Rebecca Bernard’s story, “How to Be Another Person in Five Days,” plays humorously with the trope of familiar self-help programs and fad diets that promise a “new you” in x amount of time, but the story […]
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Day of the Dead
Octavio is tired, tired of trying to separate what he remembers so vividly from the memories he can barely make out in the fog.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, a short story in the new issue of Cosmonauts Avenue turns the flashlight onto a slumber party, and not the fantasy pillow-fight and popcorn kind, but the more true-to-life kind, complete with paranormal library books, urban legends, sneaking out, and scaring the crap out of each other. “Bunny Man” by Simone Person tells […]
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Straw House
“It’s not healthy, how you live. People aren’t meant to sleep all day. We need the sun. We’re meant to live in the sun.”
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Anniversary
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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Rumpus Original Fiction: Bellevonia Beautee
I try to see it, to see forever. The backs of my eyes are hot and ache with the trying.
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Sunday Rumpus Fiction: Quietly the Flood
If anyone was old pals it was Leona and the house. Was she friends with a house?
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