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I am skinniest in the morning. My belly forgets the previous day’s sins, and I wake up looking taut like a model. Then it starts.
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214322
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“Pupilo Durcál!” She yelled. “You stupid pendejo!” He limped along without another glance. Rosa suddenly realized her dreams all week were really omens.
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128721
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Kudzu obscures the gate where jasmine bloomed last summer.
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137723
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I hold dreams made of iron / that tip my spear of regret—
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137022
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The Cleavers were never really undone by anything. Everyone, however, has a limit. June manages it all, as usual, with her characteristic grace, lovely crinoline - and a bit of manipulation.
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88521
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She took a desolate road as the wind blew.
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157321
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I remember sitting there on the first unfinished rooftop, watching you building houses out of words. You hammered in grammar and punctuation; you said these things needed to be hammered in by hand. You drove the long straight exclamation …
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180521
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I am far from home, wherever that is.
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112221
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Amir was a ghost, and he was terrible at it. No one had taught him how to be a ghost. There was no orientation, no welcome packet, no handbook. Ghosts started in limbo with only a name, and nothing else.
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140020
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I drove all night, but there weren’t nothing Roy Orbison about it. I’d been driving and around lunchtime I just thought I might stop by Shona’s place.
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303822
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Planned developments have garages in the back, hasty retreat and advance protected by the Genie Automatic, come and go and go and come, waving is optional.
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181421
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Cammie Richard's house was just like all the others in Wilchester. The exterior was vaguely reminiscent of the Dutch style; gray stone with cross beams of dark wood, with two stories and a bay window. Her yard was fertilizer green, with a giant STRATFORD FOOTBALL…
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184021
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Ripper the dog died after eating a Quarter which had lodged in Ripper's throat choking her to death. Steve Latino buried her in the backyard the next morning. He felt nothing…
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193821
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“Excuse me–where are the pig’s feet?”
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136422
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I whispered, “I love you”
and then, “Goodbye”
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149421
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son a superfly/alligator shoe clad/networking man/working a beeper and flip phone/twisting blueberry spliffs/on ma's porch
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125121
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Once something starts, there is no telling where it will go.
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161722
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Many years later, as the smell of charring straw filled the basket she was standing in, high above faces turned upwards to watch her fly, she remembered the night her fingertips brushed snow off the Alps.
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44721
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303123
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My wife is an angel.
When I was a kid, that’s what we believed dead people were. Sitting on a cloud with a halo and a harp. We learned it from cartoons, but I think I’ve heard angels are supposed to be their own order, like
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221221
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Dog time is water. Incidents bob near the surface, fall into whirlpools, sink or drift with the flow.
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159521
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He boasts of administering regular beatings to his wife and claims that she enjoyed it.
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98120
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I’ve lost interest in the limelight since I’ve come to understand that I’m not meant to be in it. We walk past the Porker Palace and see crowds of the rich with piles of pig in their hands, stacks of pork piled up on their plates as they swirl amo
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109920
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On Terry’s eighteenth birthday (the summer of 1966, the same year you graduated from high school, and the year I broke up with Sharon) I took Terry out to Fox River on my dad's ski boat, and opened up my robe and showed her all there was to show of myse
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I accidentally opened the glove compartment and stumbled upon his snub-nose .38 caliber. He saw me looking at it and smirked. “Protection,” he said, picking his teeth with a wooden toothpick after lunch. “In my line of business, you hafta have it.”
“Wh
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126520
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Saul Lies, 33 and uneager to lift his head off of the hair grease stained pillowcase that absorbed his mental anguish most nights, stayed in bed past noon
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120822
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"Excuse me. I believe you have a little something falling from your right nostril there," he said, pointing with his pinky.
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335621
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At the TV station across the street two sports team mascots are dancing and miming for the cameras. There are some young men wearing baseball caps at the viewing window simulating sex acts for the cameras.
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My sister Janis called me from Berlin and said to turn on the news. You could see the thick flurries of snow that were falling there and the flat feathers of peoples' breaths issuing from their mouths as they took turns swinging pick-axes, standing on top
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