2031 4 1
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Refuse to go to the church service, even though you already missed the funeral. Tell his mother something came up. Call his phone over and over, just to hear his voice, until his mother asks you to stop. Make a recording of his voicemail. Delete it an
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2031 7 2
|
They waited until the crowd was gone before making their move. Gill kept watch while Warren bypassed the lock.
“You sure about this?” Gill whispered. Voices echoed down the hall of the museum.
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2031 15 9
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The violin hung on the wall after that, a witness.
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2031 26 6
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She was flying back in the morning, returning to a long-distance boyfriend I believed she had cheated on while she was here but didn’t ask about because I thought it would have been too obvious and somehow ungentlemanly.
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2031 1 1
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"Ah, finally the rain stopped pouring!" She opens the window to let the sticky air out of the house. The colours outside have changed. The air is clear and the sky turns into light pink while the sun is drowning at the horizon. She takes a deep breath. The…
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2030 0 0
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An armpit fart is a simulated sound of flatulence produced by creating a pocket of air between the armpit of a partially raised arm and the hand, then swiftly closing this pocket by bringing the arm close to the torso.
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2030 10 5
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1.There's a young woman in a nightclub seated next to a window out of which she watches the slow descent of snow, illuminated by strategic lights. She imagines herself falling with those flakes. Her friend has left her for the dance floor. The young woman is…
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2029 11 7
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I walk back home, alone and without the bus fare. Distancing myself from the shadows that float interminably against the drowsy sun. Where frightened boys often roam, going in circles against the long lines of epitaphs and gravestones. Puzzling…
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2029 13 9
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Things don’t happen here, life is so boring in this little Irish town.
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2029 0 0
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No news spreads faster than news of a death. Word of the death of a child can be heard simultaneously in a thousand places. . . the word spread by telephone, in back yards from clothesline to clothesline, with whispers in grocery stores, in the looks on faces stunned into…
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2029 17 10
|
Even if your heart is as large as a small car, your tongue as heavy as two grown men—even then—you will have to carry it with you wherever you go.
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2029 0 0
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At the time I first went to work for Mr. Byron my family was in a sorrowful state. My dad, much as I can recall, was one of those roving kinds, called himself a carpenter or contractor, depending on the kind of job he was aspiring to, and was subject to f
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2029 23 22
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The painting was on loan from a gallery in Chicago. We stood there connecting the dots.
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2029 6 6
|
ghosts are local plagues/of unexpended grief—tears/can't be bodiless.
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2029 4 3
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She brought the ends of her fingers to her mouth and moistened them in her warm saliva. The whorls of her prints glistened in the harsh light of the room, but it wasn't her own outlines she was interested in raising. His hand lay outstretched in his…
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2029 6 3
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I am at a wedding with a new girlfriend. The bride is her old college roommate. I don't really know anyone else here. The wedding is being held at a huge estate, located on the edge of enormous cliffs that overlook the ocean. Despite the danger of this precarious…
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2028 3 2
|
The Bird King suffers from phantom head syndrome. Ever since his decapitation by a critic, he has felt pain where his head used to be. Sometimes it wakes him in the night. It's so excruciating, he fumbles for a saw. But alas! there's nothing to chop off.He's seen every…
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2028 3 1
|
Dizzy but still alive
Inside this conversation
I ask if you have a sister
And if she'll know me
If I'm with you.
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2028 5 3
|
The summer everyone read Faulkner, I read Hemingway. Out of spite.
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2028 0 0
|
It’s confusing enough to grow up in a place like America, a country without definitive culture, except for ranch dressing and reality TV, but it’s even worse to grow up half one thing, half another, christened a hyphenation of names without connection to
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2028 5 1
|
The light against the nylon walls of the tent gets me feeling a little down. The air's wet inside, but it's warm. The whole world outside is creaking and chirping, everything that wakes up with the dawn's first tepid blue light does so and starts making n
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2027 22 17
|
The bungalow was unlocked. The screen
door was unhooked. The trout on the
counter was deboned.
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2027 6 5
|
I peeled off a hundred. For the screwdriver, I said. The kid shook his head, made a pushing-away gesture. You need it worse’n I do right now, he said.
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2027 21 11
|
He hid in parks and abandoned apartment houses until his wounds healed. He ate nuts, berries, and seeds. A shy, gentle soul, he watched children playing on the monkey bars, and thought of his lost youth.
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2027 4 2
|
We've worked silence over /
Like pros, our best work together.
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2027 19 11
|
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2027 2 0
|
What the heck to believe in??
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2027 3 2
|
You call the shit in this paper news? ‘Dog Accidentally Shoots Man With His Own Gun, Swedish Man Bursts Into Flames on Train Platform, The Truth About Elvis's Hidden Extraterrestrial Daughter.' Seriously? Enough about Elvis already.
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2027 16 13
|
If this was the day when the bribes of whiskey and US dollars would fail to work. If on this day a black bag, smelling of shit and fear, would be pulled over his head – the bloodied roots of a knocked out tooth tickling his neck.
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2027 21 5
|
You got a lot of people, out there
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