Ripe

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On the morning of her 49th birthday, Carol Jessop stood naked in front of her full-length mirror and took stock of the situation. As a devoted gym goer, she was generally pleased by what she saw. She’d never had children so her belly was flat and her breasts, though not as round as they once were, resisted hanging on her chest like sacks of sand. Through no effort of her own, her breasts were marvellous. She had won the boob lottery, plain and simple. From the time they began to swell when she was ten to now, they were two in a million. Just last month, after speaking at the city’s literary festival, she was asked by a bearded academic, that if it weren't too much trouble, he’d like to bury his face in her cleavage for a few long seconds. She took him to her room that night, though it tickled, she let him have all the time he wanted there. read more

Subtype

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I was twenty-five the first time everything fell apart for me. My boyfriend, Dominic, broke up with me after five years together and we cut short the lease on the little flat we were renting in West Hampstead. This meant I had to scrabble around for a room to rent in London, a city that now felt vast and radically unfamiliar, even after four years there. read more

When She Showed Me Her Legs

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Morrison woke suddenly from the all-too-vivid dream. Dolores was, in fact, gone. With the hangovers they usually had, first thing they craved in the morning were those shots of espresso firing out of the machine, so they would slip out the door of the Grand Orient fast as they could and up to a counter, any counter, and ordered up two doubles to get it started. read more

Just Another 24-Hour-a-Day Job

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All my life I’ve worked in and around porn. First as a writer, then as an editor, and finally as a web content provider. Most people recoil in horror when I tell them what I do. This is the United States of America, after all, Puritania with a capital P. Unless you’re in the business yourself, you don’t realize that it’s still a business. You’ve got customers to satisfy, schedules to meet, bills to pay, and workers to contend with. Ah, the workers! read more

The Exterminator and The Girl in the Alley

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Chloe wished she had never read the poem her boyfriend, Ricardo, had written about the girl in the alley. The image of Ricardo pinning the black-haired, almond-eyed beauty in a short leopard skirt up against an alley wall outside of The Dresden haunted Chloe. read more

Portrait

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Sometimes, he would take the portrait from the folder in which he kept his youthful poetry, and gaze at it for a long time. Doting over it, reminiscing. It was a portrait of his sexual organ. Life-size. The drawing was in the classical style, with each detail drawn to such a refined level of final lines, that the whole shone with the entrancing glow of perfect harmony. And the play of light and shadow had been done with such skill, that the black seemed to undergo an entire spectrum of shade shifting, all imaginary, of course, from an airy, pearly pink, to the slightly more intense pink of a ripening raspberry, then deeper still, until it took on the shade of a red, ripened cherry. Finally, it was the color of congealed blood – the color the head of any male member becomes on the verge of the final moments of ecstasy and ejaculation. read more

Account Past-Due

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AUGUST 2020

Late in the workday I’m outside my office fetching nicotine gum from my truck, an errand interrupted by a shiny black Lexus that wheels into the parking lot and takes a vacant space among the employee parking. The driver’s door swings open, followed by sandaled feet and familiar, muscular calves beneath a mid-length brown dress, sleeveless and trimmed with white lace like the summertime clothes my mother might have worn though not fitted so closely. read more