Slab Man

My husband left me last night not for another woman but because he just found out I loved his best friend but that shouldn’t have mattered much since that guy’d dumped me a couple of weeks earlier. I sure was feeling bad this afternoon and told my boss I had a fever and needed to…

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Guy Rose Paints a Peasant

“Pardon me, Madame,” I say in French to a lady framed in the Crocker Art Museum. “May I ask you a few questions?” “You can see I’m busy, I reckon.” “Yes, but you’ve been at this task a long time and I thought you could take a little break.” “I’ll keep working, go ahead and…

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Hill of Shame

you ask why with blankets and refreshments we like tourists go to parash hill overlooking gaza and i confess i need angry orange flames and plumes of smoke black white and gray and to see buildings collapse and afterward study crimson photos of corpses wrapped white in sheets like those covering my children when they…

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Senior Scams

Don’t think thieves have no conscience. Some of us feel quite guilty, even before capture. Thankfully, I think I’ve outgrown my unacceptable tendencies; serving two stints in prison and turning seventy make a man mellow and empathetic. Today I’m just one of about fifty aging residents of Paradise Homes who’ve gathered in the community center…

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Where did Hitler Die?

I spent twenty years researching and writing a biographical novel called Hitler Here and hoped, after some post-publication interviews, I’d never have to answer any more related questions, which tended to be either of the “Did Elvis really serenade Hitler on Mars?” or “We sure need another guy like him, don’t we?” variety. Most such…

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Deadly Numbers

I was an Iraqi professor of statistics until the United States and later ISIS destroyed my classroom and much of the university. I suppose I should thank each group for attacking when school wasn’t in session, but I believe that may have been coincidental. At any rate, like civilized people everywhere, I commiserate with the…

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Ronda Rousey Returns to Earth

I haven’t been a regular fan of boxing or mixed martial arts for a long time. As a kid and young adult and even into early middle age I used to growl and cheer like millions of other bloodthirsty souls who enjoyed watching people destroy each other. Disappointingly, I don’t recall questioning this behavior. At…

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Deli Delight

I was hungry and the manager of the gallery showing wild faces said the deli across the street’s world famous go on over and get something. Okay I said and pressed the steel arrow to red-light busy Melrose Ave. and allow me to cross. Inside the deli large glass cases featured food I began studying…

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Freud and Wife Visit Picasso

In Paris Lucian and I again socialize with other glamorous and creative people, and most mornings he paints while I write, imagining myself a female Fitzgerald thirty years after Scott brought exotic but doomed Zelda to this marvelous city. Several Parisiennes tell me Lucian and I might be an even more dazzling couple. Within a…

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What Happened to Camilo Cienfuegos?

Please remember that on October twenty-sixth, 1959, at a massive rally outside the presidential palace in Havana, thousands of Cubans cheered the leader of the revolution, Fidel Castro, who launched another interminable speech. At a point when rational listeners began to tire, Camilo Cienfuegos, commander of the rebel army, arrived and stepped onto the stage…

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Parking Lot Painter

No one buys my oil paintings on canvas. No one buys my acrylics. No one buys my watercolors. No one hires me to paint murals. They’re all fools. I have great work crying to be seen, and I prove it every weekend at street painting festivals all over. We don’t actually paint. We draw, usually…

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Che Lives

For months the Bolivian army, guided by the CIA, hunts Che Guevara before wounding and capturing the worn and emaciated revolutionary. He’s taken to a small, dirt-walled schoolhouse in a mountain village and his hands and feet are separately bound. That night, as asthmatic Che wheezes and writhes on the filthy floor, Bolivian officers and…

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