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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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149921
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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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158821
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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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112720
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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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190521
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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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213620
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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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136921
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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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123523
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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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117420
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A debacle has been scheduled for 11:45...
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227920
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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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162320
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Vegas is turning out to be my kind of town. Easy money, free booze, and everyone is too overstimulated to realize I’m broadcasting right into their noggins.
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In the dark, alone after she was gone, he would whisper her name into his pillow and fight the tears more out of shear exhaustion than anything else. He had mourned for her even before she had passed, as he watched helpless while the disease marched slowly and…
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163220
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On Martini Business Nights the rules of decorum were written by Esquire or Playboy.The red bar-side book divulges the secrets brewed with ice, libation and a sleek chrome shaker, because its all about the accoutrement, and technique. Mr Boston said that, NOT James Bond. If…
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10020
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The lounge in our hotel —— the Oregon coast —— one guest, wheelchair bound, in residence for the full summer season, asks us in her Main Line Philadelphia accent, "Have you come far?" "No, not far. Flew from Salt Lake…
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84121
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"When I knocked my laptop over,” he says, "four years worth of muffin crumbs shook loose on my desk. It got me thinking about those less fortunate than me.”
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182220
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I try again. "You can make a big cup by putting your hands and fingers together, see?"
He glares at me. "A giant could make a big cup," he says. "A giant could make a giant cup."
I thought so before, and I’ll say it again. A little genius.
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192722
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No one is a Puritan under all that powder!
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111720
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162620
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142320
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What I remember about my grandfather were his fart jokes. When he wasn't telling us kids about how young David defeated the mighty Goliath or how Saul the pharisee humbled himself to become Paul the Apostle, he was telling us about the baby burp that begg
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116622
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We’d sometimes find my mother asleep in her chair outside her trailer at the nudist camp when we drove up. She loved her garden there, even with the rabbits eating her young tomato plants. She used to coax the bluebirds down to the railing of her trailer
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100721
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We got a lotta people ruinin' the public transit experience. Talkin' loud on cell phones, clippin' fingernails, even flossing their teeth.
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123322
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Keeper of the balance. Husband of the night.
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222521
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The diner was half filled with the loose ends of humanity that stayed up until five in the morning. We picked a booth by the window. The light in the diner was a dingy yellow, and the seats were that lobster-red vinyl that could only have been installe
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99922
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Living dangerously,
I left my house with no glasses,
no umbrella.
I also forgot my straw hat,
no purple dye for my gray hair,
my map of the world to come,
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389321
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When he turned to the quiet sound of her voice, he knew he'd heard her before, that she had already called out several times, and that she'd reached him somewhere in a recess of…
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195520
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...to know something people around you don’t know can put you outside of them. And then you can’t get back in...
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How old is he anyway? 35? Maybe 40? Old—but in a good and sophisticated way. Everyone says he’s good-natured and generous, Mr. John-just-like-a-movie-star-Wagner.
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"I have consulted the Internet," the man remarks, squatting low, sorting through a mountain of tablets. He snags two and stands slowly, confidently, and I realize suddenly that he is Moses. Two iPads, cradled surely in each wrist, glow with lists.
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152121
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I think we could be twins, our hands hitching us together like paper dolls, our parkas making blobby round balloon shapes as outlines for our bodies. I imagine each of us holding onto someone else, and the line continuing on from there until we have a cha
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