1134 9 10
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For instance, my sister's husband. If I say brown socks, yellow boxer shorts, fishnet undershirt. If I say plastic bag and two tepid beers. And a voice that glides to falsetto when he: you're a tad too obscene for my taste, Julia, while he tries to light the filter end of…
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95473
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the far-flung Turner boys and their broods descended upon Pemberton like locusts
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303231
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The phone screamed again, nearly rattling off the hook, and I winced. Only in the dead of night, silence all around it and with the ring so unexpected, did it register as an alarm like this.
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92331
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“Don’t do this Jack. You are better than this.” He pleaded. My lips curled, “Maybe I am, but you’re not.” I spat. I lifted up his delicate frame and threw him back against the wall of his office. I watched as his head bounced off the decorative brick
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980109
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My student assistant was a comely young woman. A freckle faced blonde. She was from Ohio.
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110764
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Saturday afternoons: tartan blanket spread on the pebble beach, transistor radio hissing static, fish paste sandwiches and seagulls. Why fish paste, Mum? She didn't dare ask.
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79600
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I look at her
really look
we both know her time is fading
"I'm just sad that you won't be there."
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142400
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that is a fair description of our family if I add the disclaimer that the girls are whores and we don’t have much in common.
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105160
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To be perfectly honest, I was lousy at my job. Or at least most aspects of it. The typing wasn’t a problem: I can get up to a hundred words a minute on a good stretch of unbroken text, and I’m pretty accurate. I even edited as I went, fixing passiv
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77611
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My dog Alfie and I would get in my van and go out at midnight for a doughnut. Or an éclair. A French cruller, to be exact. Sometimes we would get Blondie's Pizza on Telegraph Avenue near the Berkeley campus, if it got to be too lonely and restless at nigh
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112420
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I remember being sent a picture once from one of my old roommates, Louise, back in Chicago where I came from. The photo was taken when she’d come out for a visit to California. In the picture I am sitting on the front stairs of my house in the Rockridge
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97700
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Famus Peepul Ellen and her boy, Larson, were on the second floor of The Monsters restaurant, searching for the fortuneteller. Larson had decided her signature was a necessary addition to his autograph book. He hadn't asked for her autograph…
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121053
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Little mercy, ten fingers, ten toes.
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122300
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You and I will never meet. You will never even know I existed. Even in dreams you will never imagine me. Someone told me once that your sleeping mind cannot conjure up new faces. It just spits out all the ones you’ve ever seen and that’s it. That’s it.
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132695
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but with a light, a rainbow light which was scattered, maybe she herself was a scattering of light, an infinity of universes caught like the opening rays of sunlight
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99211
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Normally I would have never drank such a wine, but it was late on a Friday evening and the bottle was on the house...
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324115
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74710
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In the mechanics of the fantasy, it is essential that the wiring is maintained, all circuits working, every current flowing with the precise measurements, lest the system malfunction and the world completely lost. The engineers are constantly abuzz, constantly understaffed…
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93830
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His mother named him Far because she had high hopes for him
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100241
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At a rest stop in Montpelier, they stopped to buy Cokes and gum from the vending machines. He was showing off, trying to jimmy one of the locks with a safety pin but it stayed locked and she laughed at him and he said goddamn, look at all a them Milkyways
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774159
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far beyond the far beyond
sparkles the stars like sparkles
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67695
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I'm staying in swinging all night
Hell not just all night but every night
I can possibly sink my teeth into
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125783
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She thought maybe an angel had called out her name. She wasn't sure. She was waiting for her older sister to return with Jujy Fruits and bonbons. The theater, neither light nor dark, was to Cassie's ten-year-old mind, an appropriate-enough setting for a v
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118733
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And, you peasy-headed shrew, don’t you dare think I didn’t notice that it was you who stuck that fork into my neck in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot late Tuesday night . . .
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101522
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“What does it feel like to run, Thomas?” I yelled across the field. Thomas was so fast. I would never catch up to him. Even if I could run. He was so fast. …
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684119
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untilled, weedy, left to rest
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118300
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Still as the knife on the counter there still. Like mothballs in a chest. One with clear bags and newspaper clippings and your scarf inside it. The baby girl could put a mothball in her mouth and suck it like a penny. The way too close to a light bulb bur
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176873
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out here the land/speaks in Quaker silence
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202954
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It rained on the morning of the party, and the weatherman promised it would continue throughout the day. But Marilyn didn't mind. She actually preferred entertaining in bad weather. Her rugs weren't valuable enough to worry about, and the gloomier the sky
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1156178
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