2029 4 2
|
The stern tone of the chairwoman made him miss his mother, the snap of her accusations, the sting of her belt on the backs of his legs.
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2029 22 14
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The night we crossed the Madres my father stuffed his Stetson full of cash.
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2029 21 14
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I don't want / to write about the body indulged, desires / denied, tortures invented, pleasures innate
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2029 2 2
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She hated the noiseless dying sound they made as he stuck the hook through their eyes. She always wanted for them to scream, but they never did. They didn’t even blink.
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2029 2 2
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He pulls on his wispy goatee and shifts his weight a few times from one foot to the other. That doesn’t help. It rarely does, to be honest.
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2029 2 1
|
With my heart preserved, I shoved a handful of baubles back in its place: some pages torn from my favorite books, a bass guitar string, a butane lighter, a shot of vodka. I stitched myself back up and left the roof in favor of the attic, where I hung my s
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2028 10 7
|
Things get lost in Big John, too. I see the other guys throw jokes about his size at his body that wedge their way into his armpits or into the wrinkles of his laugh lines and disappear. I’m not sure if it all disappears to remind us how small we are,
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2028 9 4
|
Three hours isn't that long.
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2028 2 1
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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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2028 10 9
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It’s a little known fact that eels are often lost in translation – only the spotted variety, not the striped or the common and certainly not the electric.... I think about that lovely hippie girl and her knowledge of eels, sometimes.
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2028 5 4
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You know how it is, one day a good friend sends you this long note telling you how-the-hell they are or aren't getting along in the frigging world
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2028 8 4
|
None of us ever thought this would happen.
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2028 7 5
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“It’s a sad thing,” I said, “when a man has to suffer just for getting a little on the side.”
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2028 16 15
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....the first/
in a long history of indignities.
|
2028 19 17
|
A flash in seven chapters.
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2028 11 5
|
After court, the three of us skipped third period, walked down to the river and huddled under the 6th Street Bridge.
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2028 0 0
|
Incredibly he began to picture in his mind a scene not related at all to his frenzied search but of a huge plate of apple pie a la mode with the vanilla ice cream melting in streams like cool lava down the side of the pie and off of the plate.
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2028 13 10
|
sacred ground bleached with the salt of bitter tears
|
2027 6 1
|
Bearing the smell of paper on her fingertips. Ink in her hair.
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2027 8 4
|
“I don’t know what’s going on there,” Hank, who hated his name and wanted a more Biblical name because those names (Jeremiah! Matthew! David!)—although common—sound ominous, said as he pointed up to the top of the apartment building that housed the whores
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2027 18 14
|
it corrupts the smells//
and flavors of the world/
and plants its swollen face
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2027 13 11
|
I am constricted by rings. The weight of self crushes me.
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2027 15 9
|
She tells Tuesday's lover that there's nothing wrong with cheap thrills without anesthesia,
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2027 3 2
|
She was legally blind. He felt comfortable knowing she couldn’t see him very clearly.
|
2027 17 9
|
Can you find happiness in the middle of a kidney stone attack?
|
2027 10 4
|
What happens to a town when all of its songbirds go on strike?
|
2027 4 2
|
The dogs shit on the roof and then, every two weeks or so, the man in Apartment 311 climbs out the window with a plastic shovel and scoops the shit into a white plastic bag, which soon grows heavy with dung, dangling from his black-gloved wrist.
|
2027 8 4
|
He beats the girl, stabs her 22 times, rapes her, then uses his fingertips to push her orbital sockets into the back of her head before killing her. At trial, he laughs about whether or not there…
|
2027 6 1
|
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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2027 22 12
|
The drinking will continue/
until morale improves
|