1861 0 0
|
In se'enties style serenading strut
A passin all the pretty birds in kin',
The feathered Stetson ‘clipsin crimson suit,
A whistlin Dixie blues ‘cross county-lines.
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1861 4 1
|
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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1861 0 0
|
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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1861 5 4
|
Her pudgy face, flour-coated and sugary and so life-nurturing in the past, had a different spark now, a searching look I’d seen as soon as she opened the door.
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1861 9 3
|
She wrapped her legs around him. His hand barely held the rope and later he could not have said if it happened above or below the water’s surface.
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1861 11 5
|
After court, the three of us skipped third period, walked down to the river and huddled under the 6th Street Bridge.
|
1861 11 5
|
i.More and more, for Megan LeMaster, each beginning was its own end. She couldn't bear to buy flowers or dresses that seemed too beautiful. Friendships formed, endured, gave out in a handshake. Each deed in life had an immediate, inescapable…
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1861 3 4
|
“Do you think she paints?”
“Her face, a little, But don’t you find her kind of bony?”
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1861 12 9
|
Harpo sits and looks at something I can't see. I drink beer and ask him questions. I ask him how they found the cancer. Backache, he says. He went to see a doctor.
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1860 6 4
|
Gorgonzola. It's what she was to bring this time. Plumtree's potted meat. What it was last time.
|
1860 4 2
|
So it was cancer. And so he was screwed, royally screwed. He was screwed all the more because he knew how screwed he was. He had to carry the shame of knowing, as much as he wanted to deny it, that this had been his first thought when he found out about h
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1860 4 4
|
["This is not a snippet of text. This is only a test."]
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1860 20 15
|
Feminine, safe, though disembodied,/
she shapes your life in ways/
your mother never could.
|
1860 13 12
|
But by day the birds / of prey were in control.
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1860 8 4
|
I want crazy at my funeral. I want clowns, a petting zoo, fireworks, craps tables, male and female strippers, and a three-person band composed of old men wearing striped vests, black pants, and straw hats: one plays a banjo, another on tuba, and…
|
1860 7 0
|
"Do you have to call your brother a loser? He is not a loser and that was just uncalled for"
|
1859 13 9
|
Things don’t happen here, life is so boring in this little Irish town.
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1859 5 1
|
The waitress says,
“That’s a memory,”
as the smoke dances around her head.
|
1859 3 2
|
“You wanna fight.”
And I say yes.
And he says –
“First, we gotta make out.”
|
1858 1 1
|
In sleep their bodies drift between the sheets until they find each other.
|
1858 21 9
|
There is a small church in the south of Italy, with a stained-glass window depicting the sister of John The Baptist.
|
1858 21 18
|
When I died, she said, she was going to have me cremated and put my ashes in the cats’ litter box.
|
1858 1 1
|
"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…
|
1857 2 0
|
Duh. It’s all the same sky. Instead I nod, and don’t say anything.
|
1857 4 1
|
She comes in with her white bag with its floral patterns scattered, almost accidentally, all around it
|
1857 6 6
|
She sang will you still need me
|
1857 4 3
|
On Day 1122 at 4:14 AM the door which has remained since installation firmly glued to the masonry behind opens and a man emerges blinking shielding his eyes against fine stinging snow.
|
1857 3 3
|
Blacked-out out on junk, I bet money on a sport I hated just last year.
|
1857 1 1
|
I spent the whole day at Oliveira's, writing furiously in my notebooks. The words came pouring out. Just before seven, Darrell picked me up. I grew anxious driving down to Parker's studio because it was in a bad area on the border between Oakland
|
1856 13 9
|
with cool confidence
and believable body language
|