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Slipshod shoes were the first sign of a meltdown. Sometimes she could see it coming. A prickly gentleman washing his clothes on a Thursday afternoon. One week he’s fine. Nothing wrong with owning a sour face. The next Thursday, his shoes don’t match.
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165221
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Pull her from the water and check
her pockets. Shouldn’t death tattoo
a message on each palm it removes
the pulse from.
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96621
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In need of help, he bought his first self-help book at the age of twenty-nine.
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116422
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paste into browser:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsSKsjOTCFU&feature=em-upload_owner
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135121
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‘Do I still ‘respect’ you? Ha! - there’s a sweet old-fashioned phrase! I don’t know, maybe not so much ...
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190821
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A herd of garbage trucks groaned down dark streets filling their black hydraulic hearts with rotten trashcans and glass, and a smile ate her whole face. I showed her a text from a friend: "T-minus 10 seconds till meltdown."She laughed and I wrote back.A small,…
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68922
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We were always blowing stale enough air into each other's faces from the smallest roundest tables available looking at each other sideways at the same sad time as the puppet show…
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145721
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On a hot summer day in downtown San Francisco, a flasher gets more than he bargains for when the woman he flashed at a coffeehouse pulls out a gun.
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116022
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By dawn, she is ready to hunt.
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109321
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Allow me one moment of stasis from pain, If I must really become that one, Who brought by giant hand man's gain, And suffered through theft of the sun. No dagger pricks the injured side, Or vulture picks the source of bile: Still must wan hordes…
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71520
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Then there was this short little girl, Jo Ann, who had a daughter and was divorced, who lived next door to Andy. She told me right after we did it one night that she had always wanted to have sex with me when she was growing up, as a teenager, I mean. A
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106321
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Listening too much to the night, with its whistles, bright lights of luminescent bursts like leaves on fire, or the raised ear of a cow in the purple mist, or the curled tail of a pig foraging in the night.
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96020
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An old man leaning over his stamp collection. His burning face glows with bourbon. Underneath, children try to stretch moments. Each toss of the ball, turn of the handlebars a deliberate time shaping exercise to see how much distance they can…
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135620
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It takes almost an hour before I drift to sleep on the bus. When I wake up in Crescent City, I’m surprised. Maybe I was going somewhere else in my sleep. Walking out of the station, it feels like a strange place. Somewhere I’ve never been before. The
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78520
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The story of the black pen drawing a dark hole
makes everything seem so elaborate and obscure.
Or even a seven-year-old leading police
on a wild car chase to avoid church.
Or naming a new band Fuchsia,
which looks like the beginning of an
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189621
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round & round
this empty block
again & again i go
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174521
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Enter Tipitina’s – the rotation hole
where electric, shoeless uncles
allocate their copper goulashes
to catch white dripwater.
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151721
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Six thousand dollars was a small price for a man's life. Mario was in the back seat of the Honda with Johnny next to him handcuffed, all tense. Francisco had it on a rap station, the sort of music that gave Mario a headache.
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216521
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I looked up “tupping.” It doesn’t have anything to do with Tupperware. It’s Old English for screwing. Just like a professor–make something harder so you’ll get it wrong on the mid-term.
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127821
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if you don't quiver with anticipation you'll barely manage to explode
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127122
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Her eyes blaze through the green burka as her veil drops, revealing skull where face should be. Her teeth form a death grin, words pour from within, hollow like a baby's rattle. She speaks Farsi
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116621
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He stood in front of her. They stood eye to eye. "You aren't supposed to look me in the eye. If I were anyone else you would be smacked down on the ground right now. Treat me as you would a lover, your master."
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126221
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Father hands Billy a length of rope. Billy builds his resolve, fights back his tears, heads into the kitchen. It's time to become a man.
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96620
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After Loretta McKinley had sat for just such a time on a rock near the tribe, hallucinating and coming as close to death and God as she ever had, she walked into the camp and asked to speak with the elders.
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159321
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"How could anyone say that I was wrong, that I was crazy?" These thoughts scraped across her mind and tore open the reasons she had knitted herself into over the years.
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168420
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The pizza was perfect, ingredients genuine, not artificial: crust charred slightly; cheese gooey; sauce steaming, requiring careful eating lest the mouth suffer burns. Such quality was becoming rare around town. The product in Manhattan, by and large,
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110621
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It began not so innocently
with voyeuristic tendencies.
the sound of concrete
and confetti in the night.
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103223
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Our friend, M. Dieu-Juste partnered in a used car business with a Vietnamese mechanic, Mr. Tran. Cars however, were not their only venture.
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97720
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A debacle has been scheduled for 11:45...
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198120
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The snake glides unhurriedly through the garden one warm July afternoon looking for a schmoose. Or barring such pleasant daytime passage, a shady snoozing spot. He twines himself about the gravid apple tree’s trunk caduceus-like, slithering his handsom
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