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Taking Chances

Michael Gigandet · Fiction · November 2026
Examining himself in his wife’s bedroom mirror, Martin didn’t think he looked that bad for a man in his early 60s, which really meant he didn’t look as bad as a lot of people his age thanks to good genes inherited from his mother’s side of the family. “We die youthful looking,” his mother assured him once. “You’ll be glad for that when you die.”“Anyway, no one can say I let myself go,” he said out loud. Being a retired widower for two years now and living alone in a big farmhouse just outside of Nashville, he’d decided he could talk out loud sometimes so long as he didn’t do it around people.In his right hand, Martin held a letter, an invitation from the Department of Motor Vehicles to come down and see them about a new driver’s license photograph.Some people might call that an imposition, one of those inconveniences in life that you can’t do anything about except stop what you are…
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Catalina Novac — Painting
Catalina Novac · Painting · November 2026
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Great empires rarely perish from catastrophic convulsions. More often than not, they simply fragment into individual rooms, corridors, and sanitary zones.
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Cathriona Lafferty · 2012 · Poetry
A recovered text from the first iExile body — returned to circulation, not as nostalgia, but because it still burns.
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Bulă, or How We Invented Quantum
Bulă, or How We Invented Quantum
Jaia Papitz
A literary satire about laughter, bureaucracy, and the small cosmic errors that keep reality from sealing itself shut.

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