How Things Look

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 …important ARE looks?

Shel knows why she got this job and is ok with it most of the time. It makes sense that a place like this isn’t going to want some babe at the front desk. For one thing, anyone with any looks at all is going to start getting ideas and who needs the turnover? She hands a clipboard with all the agency’s forms to the mother of yet another coltish girl as three of this month’s most booked properties swan in for their schedules. They glide through the double doors to what too many young women in…


By Remington Write

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Strategic

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…everyone else actually happy to be here with the fluorescent poison sliding down their hair follicles, pounding away at keyboards and dying a little more in each cubicle, each day? Look at Hammer; his fat face all squinched up as he lets loose with more of his stupid jokes. And oh sweet Christ on a biscuit! I’m going to start including every um and uh and belch from each junior associate and up.

Davis transcribes tapes. Currently he’s working at a somewhat sketchy law firm and is booting up to transcribe this morning’s sessions but first he just has to…


By Remington Write

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The Do Over

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…last mortal act was murder. 

Now, prowling the dark places, she wonders about karma and redemption. And what a really good pastrami sandwich would taste like. 

She was standing where she always stood on the platform, well away from the crowded spots by the stairs and turnstiles, reading. Let the rest of the cattle shove themselves into the middle cars. Even when she didn’t get a seat, she at least had some breathing room by coming down here to the end of the platform. 

Sometimes she gazed idly at the steps that led down into the tunnel and wondered about…


By Remington Write

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Unexamined Rituals

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Written for Burning Man 2017 on the theme Radical Ritual

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…first time Joey crossed himself at the threshold of the church was because he saw Auntie Sue doing it. She did it smooth and ladylike so Joey felt a little self-conscious but he saw other guys, grown men, doing it and that was enough for him. When his older sister, Marie, came along with them (which wasn’t very often) though, she didn’t do it. Marie didn’t do most of the stuff that people around here did. Joey and Marie, they weren’t from around here except now they were because Daddy…

By Remington Write

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Mouthful of Stones

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We can only hold those stones for so long.

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…hate it when that fat spic runs the vacuum cleaner right outside of my room first thing every morning.” Mr. Bluebird is, hands down, the most annoying ‘guest’ in this sad excuse for a hotel. “Can’t she jest say no to the Mickey D’s? Hell, I can’t hardly get past her in the hallway.”

Marjean’s enjoying the breeze coming in the front door; smells a little like rain. There’s some good, old Motown playing on the radio and she’s got a cup of Brenda’s coffee. Be nice if that new one…

By Remington Write

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Fallen Apple

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Some writers have great skill and determination. Some just have luck.

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…the daughter of a famous suicide is a valid career path. One bullet and no door has ever been closed to me.

On the last Tuesday of October in 1962, a jewel of a day with the kind of blue sky that makes you want to cry, my mother put her notebooks in order, chronologically, and sent a final draft of her last poetry collection to her agent. My sister and I were at our babysitter’s so the only one to hear the report of the pistol was our…

By Remington Write

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