1784 7 3
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Oh I'm melting all right, into a foul vapor rising from a dead volcano, not even able to spit fire, but only cold old frozen rock like dribbles of putrid plasma.
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178488
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It took all four of his kids to convince my father to pull the plug. Mom's car crash had left her a vegetable, but of course he hung on. Once they withdrew life support, she was gone in ten minutes. The first thing our father said was that he was hungry. He felt…
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17831614
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The woman carried a wooden log which was her husband into the house.
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178375
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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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17833315
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To envy faith, to envy love --//
is there a fate more hateful? Choices/
scatter like stars. Too many.
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178362
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The figure was covered in a light blue chenille bathrobe, splayed out on her back on the floor by the glass door, her hair done up in large curlers, a slipper lying askew by her left foot. Richie crouched near the face and the rancid flame of bourbon lea
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178322
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Wee-wee-sweet-pea me? I live, I weep, a third of me passed in sleep, start a scene or two, play and dance the fool, …
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178232
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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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178211
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“They picked me up in their spaceship about noon,” Austin Grantham says to me while pulling up an apple crate to use as a stool.
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178221
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Gracious have been my years of late;
The windy drifts blown soft.
Truth be told, such luck seemeth bait
Eliciting doubts and wonderings.
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178210
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178202
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I might as well just keep driving. Past my exit. Beyond my job. Just drive. Until the tank runs out of gas. A blank future is better than this bleak one.
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178200
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wrap me in the soft, cool blanket of night. waning,the moon peers down at melike the heavy-lidded eye of some cyclops. and if I be lost like poor Odysseus,cloak me in the soft, warm wool of night. and if my eyes fail me like old Tiresias,stitch the cloth with…
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178243
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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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17812010
|
Went back to his cab and returned with a whip...
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178142
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Had I scoured all five boroughs of New York I couldn’t have found a more perfect imperfect object for my affections. Morgan was crazy as a loon, with the common sense of a mackerel and the emotional stability of a canary. But believing love could conquer
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17811913
|
perjured like a fickle impulse
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178162
|
It was already 3:30 PM. Where had all the time gone? Linda looked up from her computer monitor over at Carlos, who had his face intently pointed at his. "We have to go soon," she said. "We want to avoid rush hour traffic.""Where did we put the address?" Carlos answered, not…
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17811010
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A block after his first crime, he found a bookstore to commit another.
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1781135
|
Dad woke us up and said it was time to go.
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178033
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She stared unbreakingly, confident, knowing; and talked so close to my face I felt cornered. But her voice was something, low and smooth.
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178080
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“You always use that as a crutch. You, a sixteen year old girl. The way you were…” She looked at me, shaking her head, looking at my body as if remembering some wrong, some thing that should not have been.
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178011
|
They say ehmand for almond in the San Joaquin Valley.
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1780118
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Everyone at the Bermudez Brothers Combined Shows and Circus held one low opinion or another about Jimmy Dubcek.
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178022
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Marion had decided to stop whenever she came upon Amarillo. It was close to two a.m. when she pulled into the motel parking lot. Momma, read the nametag on the woman at reception. Her face was illuminated by a TV. Her hair curlers were illuminated by the lone desk lamp…
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17801311
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When the planes crashed,when the levees broke,when the ground shook,there was a song I dreamed of,humming subsonic,a chorus of voices and prayersuncorked like the little brown jugthat holds all the love and memories.In the outback, Aborigines believewe create the world by…
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178010
|
The summer before cancer—the summer of the boy/friend, the summer before Max started high school, the summer when all the decisions about blowing apart their marriage were made—they drove to Martha's Vineyard. Astrid had insisted she wasn't going, rig
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1779107
|
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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177953
|
Even though it was late November, it still bloomed. Extravagantly. Obviously it had no shame, obviously it reveled in its own beauty.
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177984
|
“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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