Adam Susskind
Joined March 2010 and calls Blue Shift Creations home.
85 stories, 6 challenges, 232 comments, and 5 friends
Hola. Enjoy the ficlys.
Stories
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Julie (A Poem)
We met in September. Found love in May. Spent the summer together. Broke a couple personal rules. Heard a lot of clichés, About first loves, And why it wouldn’t really work. “Just leave that high school girl at home.” She and I went to school, T...
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Oh, By the Way (A Poem)
She and I pack up a couple good laughs for the road, And make a couple more on the way. We’ll always have enough. For now, we’re young and stupid. We’ve got everything squared away. A neatly organized world. Everything has its place- most of it i...
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Or When (A Poem)
At some point, wondering. But certain at any rate. Because wondering is like having hope. Hope in spite of terrible odds. Like When a child lies awake in bed looking into the darkness of her bedroom, Or when a boy fails his math class to spite his m...
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Regret (A Poem)
Try this. Find her. The one. Special. Perfect. For a while. Be her superhero. Buy her chocolate. Enjoy the cliche. Start slow, speed up. Mix two parts shallow breathing, three parts love. Stop. Idealize. For the first time in your life, be the optimist...
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How to Lose Your Virginity (A Poem)
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Shell of a Man P.4
With one leg gone the other simply had to go, and soon after, his penis. He beat his chest in to see if he had a heart, and he reached through the hole and felt around. There was nothing for a long while, but he knew there had to be… something. Anyth...
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Shell of a Man P.3
Eventually he let go of his hand and looked. It was strange. A bit of skin was certainly missing, but it didn’t seem like there was anything on the other side. Just a kind of… hollowness. He pressed and prodded, and eventually the edges of the hole...
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Shell of a Man P.2
He knew he was getting older. His house looked like the house his parents used to own in Miami, because the nail clipper, like everything else, was exactly where he expected it to be. Next to the bottle of light-green toothpaste in the medicine cabinet...
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Shell of a Man P.1
He almost slipped on the shampoo that spilled to the suctioned rubber mat on the shower floor. When he caught himself before chipping a tooth, he clutched the handle on the wall and sighed deep relief, looking down at the drain as the spout battered th...
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Buy This Poem
Take your world, It’s less than fair, What do you know? What do you care? Sell to the people you love, Love to the people you sell. Welcome to America, This is your hell. And while you’re sleeping, It’s late in the hour, You think you’re missin...
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While the World Sleeps
I pulled the phone out of my pocket. The bus was quiet. 3 A.M to Buffalo. Everyone was asleep save an older man with a newspaper in the back of the bus and the pretty girl with the laptop behind me. We cruised across the pavement, a cough here, a grunt...
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The Field Again
I would have to send them in again, or replace them. When I looked out the window of the third floor, I saw them in the field again, staring upwards to the sun like they were about to drown in a sea of UV. They had burnt out again. Fried. Something ins...
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Single Socks
I looked at the bar of soap in the dish by the faucet and wondered if it was going to remember me. Back in my room, the half-full closet was looking half-empty. There was a tv too big for the dorm room, a few scattered pens and pencils, a mountain of d...
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The White and the Water
Grinning devilishly she tipped the glass over and watched the water rush across the white table surface and to the edge where it dripped unceremoniously into a small pool that swelled and splattered by the foot of her chair. This was entertainment at i...
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Bedtime for the Last Time
The dog waited at the foot of the stairs. Once or twice that week it crept up laboriously, heaving its old, heavy body up, one step at a time, it’s distended underbelly dragging on the long beige rug that ran the length of the staircase. When it ...
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Plates, Trays, and Automobiles
A little place called Four AM. We stepped into the dinner, knowing our money was low. We’d been traveling at night a lot. There were two younger Latino men in the corner booth, sipping coffee, and debating the wonders of nighttime driving with th...
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The Book
They were accruing an enormous database of knowledge about him. He knew it was happening. It was… a game he couldn’t resist, and every time he logged on, the attacks would get worse. They knew how to get to him. Part of him hated it. Part o...
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Push-Ups at Midnight
I got off the computer. The website was almost done, lines of code, endless, burned into my vision even when I closed my eyes. Midnight again. Everyone was asleep. I listened to the machine whir to a gentle close. I plugged in my cell phone, put my wal...
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Lilac Park and Gray Snow
With a kind of blind devotion to the task, they sat there, under the lilac, sheltered from the August sun. Out past the fence at the end of the grass, there was little. Some stone, some concrete, some ash. This lilac park might be the only color left, ...
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House Boat
The jingle sounds off from the little speaker on the phone. Flash of red on the screen. It takes forever. Pete is in a daze, the shard of glass in his leg keeping him somewhere between conscious and comatose. There’s a sloshing noise, massive. Wa...
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The Ride
It was probably a bad idea to begin with. My father gave us the old family station wagon when we turned seventeen, so we figured that because the car was falling apart anyway, we might take it for a bit of a spin. We put a few bags of cement mix in the...
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Four Years and Two Hours
Erica gave me a half asleep look from her desk on the other side of the room. This was becoming the longest two hours of my life. The administration had decided that Erica and I were going to enjoy the company of the chairs and desks of PS 104 for just...
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Milk and Beer
On the way to San Francisco I ended up stopping in one of those one horse town general stores with the hand tools in the back, the milk and beer in one refrigerator on the side and the chewing tobacco by the counter. The pair of overalls behind the cou...
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Victorian Prose
I saw a blackened ruin. This ashen earth upon which my feet now tread had, since my departure, lost its former grandeur. Yet, in this place faded glory; I realized that the fears I had once endured now held no promise of returning to me. The darkened ...
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The New Face
The rain knocks about outside with a clamor not unlike gunfire. Eve huddles with the baby under the awning and occasionally I lean out to peer upwards at the dark sky, wondering if it’s true that chickens can drown in the rain just by gawking up at t...
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Signature of a Motorized World
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Bronze Statues and Saline
The moon, out passed the mist above the city, passed the bell tower, whose deep clang subsided into a quiet rumble, past the Bargello and its jutting endless battlements, from whence no one who ever entered ever left. The moon, out past the endless red...
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There's No Place Like Home
When we looked at the ashen earth where the house had been, there was a dull silence that fell over us. Everyone had made it out safely, so there was no real reason to cry, but tears welled in my father’s eyes anyway. The fire department gave us ...
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Dirt
Chris was beginning to question the wisdom of the trip. His ancient border collie sat next to him on the front lawn, panting and wheezing in the dew of the morning air. A fog had moved in off the lake overnight and covered the town in a hazy blanket. C...
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Limbo Theory
She sipped the coffee from behind the plate glass in the lodge, toying with the idea of another run down the slopes. Only a few braves had climbed into the gondolas. With snow falling like it was, she wasn’t going to blame anyone for staying in b...
