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  • Archives:
    February 2011

    4. Report on Internet User

    By Andrew Pippos

    Eats dinner in front of computer, listening to English band active between 1989-1996. Sends text message to single woman unlikely to respond. Disregards fact she never replied to message three weeks ago. Finds diversion: spends large sum of money on Japanese denim from online store. No reply to text. Drinks rest of wine bottle, opens beer. Removes T-shirt and looks at self, disgusted by pelt of fat covering chest and stomach. Fat not all there last time he looked. Submits to passing rage and smashes dirty plate in sink. Finishes drink, cleans up broken plate, sweeps floor. Stops himself from walking to corner store for cigarettes. Remembers why he quit smoking years ago—an extended and immediate family history of lung and pancreatic cancer. Browses image search of professional indoor volleyball player. Irons shirt in case message arrives from unlikely and disdainful woman. Almost calls unlikely woman but his pulse hammers out code that signals a mistake. Decides: that’s enough booze tonight. . . . Read More.

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    3. Estrellas y Rascacielos

    By Justin Taylor

    The anarchists were drinking victory shots and making toasts because even though they’d never met with success before they surely knew it when they saw it or it found them. Snapcase, his beard effulgent with spilled drink, was sure that school was out forever. He’d tossed Jessica’s survey of art history, his own Norton Shakespeare, and somebody’s copy of Derrida’s The Gift of Death into the fire pit they had dug in the backyard. The shallow hole was surrounded by salvaged chairs and shaded by a blue canvas canopy they’d stolen from some resort because property was always already theft anyway, and plus they had really wanted that canopy. The books were doused with whiskey from a bottle of Ancient Age. Snapcase lit a hand-rolled cigarette and then tossed his still-burning match into the shallow pit. It went out in the air, so he lit another and placed it gingerly in a little pool of whiskey. It snuffed there. Someone said something about lighting three matches in a row. Somebody else said no, the expression was no three on a match. And how that expression had come from World War I, because if you lit three cigarettes off one match in your foxhole or trench the enemy in his foxhole or trench had three pins of light to triangulate your location and then he blew up everything or maybe just shot you and your two buddies.

    Knock off the history book shit, Snapcase said. Where were the history books anyway? His fire was still unlit. . . . Read More.

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