1956 8 7
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I'd been working for two years as a barista in a Starbuck's in a giant, two-story Borders in an upscale mall on Rt. 355, a main artery between Washington D.C., and Frederick, Maryland. I'd finished my M.F.A in 2000 and was trying to build up steam for more grad…
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195643
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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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1955109
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We watch the news together every day.
10 minutes total; flashes of tragedy broken up with fluffy current events.
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19551510
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There was gonna be a rumble in our schoolyard. An outright brawl. It was gonna be just like Blackboard Jungle. Only real. Not some movie at the Duwamish Drive-In. Every boy in my school, it seemed like, was lined up outside except me. All the third and fourth graders…
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195511
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What? No, no, where did my world go? I was in the middle of… something. What's going on? What's stroking my face?
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195562
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The night is a jelly slosh, a fertile rumble, a rhumba, black and seeping, thick. An arm rises.
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19551614
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The woman carried a wooden log which was her husband into the house.
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195500
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Sometimes Seattle's the next thing to heaven. The sky's diamond blue, the sun's a caress; your whole soul can breathe. You know what the shouting's about. But the sun quickly fades to Protestant gray and the gray last a long…
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195521
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For ten minutes I would have to sit perfectly still on the edge of her bed, thinking of Road Runner and the Flash and wishing I could do anything but sit there with my feet in warm, foamy water.
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19552015
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Feminine, safe, though disembodied,/
she shapes your life in ways/
your mother never could.
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195561
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Bit by bit I was traveling away, we thought. Maybe I’d join myself, all together, in Toronto. Or in an industrial coffee can. Or in the closet. “Check the closet,” I pointed.
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195520
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What the heck to believe in??
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1954103
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He wanted me to learn the business, to become the son he always wanted but never had. I eagerly complied.
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195400
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“Where are you going?” asked the young man. Teary-eyed and beaten, he gently put his hands on the shoulders of Snow-child, her back turned from him. “Home,” Snow-child said. “I'm going back to Norway.” …
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19541614
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In the St. Mark's Bar and Grill romance is a speedy thing, a blurred whir of grope, kiss, connect. The tricky thing is timing: to leave in time for the boozy love of the hour to carry through to full, naked contact. Some succeed of course. Others overstay, hang past the…
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195462
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And now its done! Five months read! This book is batoning in my head. Its eleven o'clock AM and hot as hell, even the breeze, billowing nets through the sliding screen adds sweat, cuts me down to size. I will needs again to…
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195451
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in his thin, swanky
black leather jacket
out on the town at night
in Mexico with his girlfriend
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195451
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One year, she got a kite.
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1954177
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After not going out for weeks, I went to a bar and met an electrical engineer, a motorcycle racer who raced in the Black Hills, a Renaissance man, in a relationship with a young married woman, and I told him about the toad.
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195433
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People ask me sometimes what it’s like to meet your wife when you’re six years old, and I have to admit now that I don’t really understand the question. Marla and I, we were just friends for most of that time. She made me laugh. I let her crib off my math
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195442
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I had the hair of a metal god, cracking it against the air whenever the stereo belched fists.
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1954117
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Kramer wraps himself around Kramer’s legs, from behind, then lifts him and tips him up and over and down, per their rehearsed routine.
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195322
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She would have moved on to the next guy in the next bar, the one who looked like danger on a stick.
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195321
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time. Night after night he's up, restless. What if she knew his plans? If only he'd bypass his miscalculations and slip through
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195350
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Alone,we are ageless togetherin the heart of our precious now.A relentless wedge of image and vanity, gossip and innuendo, acceptable and most certainly not, dashes our agelessness intoan insurmountable chasm of years.That diabolically…
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195354
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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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195284
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At first we envied Tom and Betty’s dancing. Friday nights at The Big Club, Saturdays at Mickey’s, and none of us can remember a time we saw them in the arms of another partner.
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195200
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A night bird lands on the windowsill with a struggling copper moth in its beak. The bird cocks its head at Rasmus, then swallows the clockwork insect in a gulp before flying away.
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195220
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“We’re prisoners,” Sean reminded the guard. “Prisoners of your military.”
“You have never been treated as such.” Captain Hughes looked around the bar. “This festival is a celebration of you, of all of you. We pride ourselves on ou
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1952102
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I never pulled it off, never rode an atom through a super collider with a nose full of cocaine and a drink in my hand. Never was a bullet, zooming through the city, skin pressed to bone, nerves on fire. Never was an atom bomb, ever-exploding in slow motion, ripping off…
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