david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Dec 23, 2010, 9:52 am
I bought the newspaper out of pity before I boarded the local. It felt thin, and looked like nothing new. I swiped my card near the fare box and at the same time watched myself do so on a monitor showing me from behind, shot by the camera above the door. Other cameras grabbed me from other angles an... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Oct 2, 2010, 9:48 pm
I owe the Xuuxu my life but no gratitude. Once they flushed us from our valley and stood us naked, side by side in the long grass under the sickle moon, lowlands clansmen that the colonists favored—by which I mean tolerated and bestowed with courtesies that felt like slaps on the jaw—they had to... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Aug 25, 2010, 8:14 am
The water flows both ways through the tunnel of love, depending on which rusty lever I force! Like life, this tacky carnival ride with its soggy boats bobbing in a curving trough is not a circle but a figure-eight, or an eighty-eight, that doubles back and gives us second chances to be noble or to w... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Aug 15, 2010, 9:08 pm
Although I could be fired for asking out loud, your city council have all been wondering if other towns are shrinking too, and if so, what’s being done to stop the trend or reverse it. They ask as if we’d already proclaimed our town is getting smaller, which we haven’t, but should. The change ... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Aug 5, 2010, 11:47 am
He’s not always easy to see. I can be talking to him in my room on a rainy afternoon with the radio playing and sharing a blueberry pie, and my dad will open the bedroom door and Deuce’ll be gone and it looks like I’m eating a pie by myself and talking to the radio. And just like that he’s m... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Jul 15, 2010, 8:08 pm
Some of my stuff I want to keep after I’m dead, but Ariel can pick out three things from my toy-box, not three of the same things, like not three ponies, or not even two insects, but a pony and an insect and a piece of furniture would be good, and she can ride my bike when she’s big enough. Then... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Jul 9, 2010, 10:11 pm
We boys had a club in the attic of Mitchell’s garage, the whole time I knew him and until he disappeared. We had handshakes and irrelevant passwords to guard against infiltration attempts that sadly never occurred. We thought we knew what a club for men should have, so we hired my sister to dance ... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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May 2, 2010, 3:24 pm
Our shabby little houses look like conjoined twins inexpertly separated. Her family’s house got the worst of the porch, ours got the sagging gutters. What used to be rivers of green grass flowing between the houses and the street, and between the houses and the houses behind, our families divided ... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Mar 28, 2010, 6:29 pm
I picked it up on a minor island, the one with the grimy harborfront, I think, and the spine of useless mountains like a broken back along its northern coast as if it had been stepped on. The guidebook called the inhabitants a joyous and friendly people, and perhaps they are to one another. Their fr... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
So, this is the ocean, I thought. The poets call it everything but what it is, poison from here to the horizon. My girlfriends in their candy colored bikinis ran ahead to the pier. They knew better than to be around me. How does it take rain and make it bitter, and why are we not angry, I asked the ... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
Before it grew too big to lift, the hospital could have moved to a better neighborhood or invested in its neighbors. Instead it pushed out handymen and cleaning ladies and street hawkers like my uncles and nudged their tilting houses down, clearing room to stretch out one expansive wing after anothe... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
You’re right. Management is at fault, not your hard work. The board of directors should lose their jobs; hell, they should probably spend time in jail, but we both know that won’t happen. Instead, you’re going to take the fall for their bad choices. Hold that thought. I’m still talking. You ... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
Grammar and my own impatience landed me in jail. If I had only turned the page, I would have seen my healthy ex-fiancee smiling for the camera on the day of her promotion, very much alive in the finance section. Instead, I took a single appearance of the past perfect progressive tense in the article... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
The 5:42 to Belgenhagen left the station without our engineer. He chased it desultorily to the end of the platform waving his pastry in vain at the empty locomotive car as we pulled out from the shed into the icy dawn with certain questions. Among them, since the train had departed early, should we ... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
Black and White each had doubts that the other existed, but for White the question had consequences. “At a minimum,” insisted Black from his seat on the tenure board, “Professor White should offer proof, before being declared permanent, that he temporarily is.” White replied, without indicat... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
We hired a double for Bob so that the Bob the world required could be places Bob could not be. We oversucceeded. Immediately, Bob was a fraud. He was not intrinsically as entertaining as his double, and while he was older by a day, and then a year, and eventually the father of himself, the doubles c... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
Dad has gone and left me with this box of I don’t know what. It has stood like a book on the cookbook shelf with undiscarded yellow pages and other worthless paper, but I never called anyone whose number I didn’t know, or cooked anything I couldn’t figure out, or needed to save my life. I was ... Comment - Like
david b dale posted an article on
Very Short Novels
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
My dear wife, the gentlemen who detain me do not understand why you neglect to send what they ask for my release. Try to appreciate that when they saw us get out of your patron’s car at the embassy, they took us to be valuable. I think they will not bargain as long as I live, so do what you can. A... Comment - Like
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