1818 8 2
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My piano tutor, a walnut-faced shrew, rapped my knuckles with her small plastic baton to smack them back into the proper tempo, an adagio I’d mastered weeks before. One hour until the audition and damn if this woman didn’t break the skin of two of my fing
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181800
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Lighter-than-air flight was back. The skies of the coast were alight with colorful balloons, dirigibles, and zeppelins tethered to their docking towers along the beach, the huge aircraft bobbing in the breeze up and down the coast for miles,…
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181721
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He’d been wishing for months that he’d bought a retro clothing store. He would have called it HARRY’S HOARY HOSERRY. He would have met a better class of women.
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181743
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Grace Gibbons is a way of life.
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1817114
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Billy had crystal blue eyes A small mouth And long hair to cover up his Hearing aids. He told me once, with his hands How he liked to submerge His head in water and yell So loud he could feel it. "I can hear myself that way," he…
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181711
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Steve Bancroft’s future wife showed up at his door that same night, slamming her hand loudly against the door and shouting for him. “Steve, Steve, wake up. Damn it, come on. You forgot to pick me up at the airport. Who are you in there with? I said wa
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1817189
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feathered waves of tangerine peach
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181610
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“What I really want to know is, why is a straight guy called Caspar opening a lesbian leather bar in Berlin anyway?” Shona asked. “Schöneberg must really be going to the dogs.”
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181621
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She persisted. “How long have we been here?”
A note of anger crept into his voice. “How long? How long? Why …, why ….” He swallowed hard, realized he had forgotten.
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18161210
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Poor kid. She didn't mean to leave my business card on her kitchen counter next to the telephone. It was a mistake.
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181652
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And the voodoo pins pinged as, folding and imploding, she was reduced to a petro-chemical puddle.
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181610
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It was stubborn early winter, when everyone was cold but went outside anyways, rubbing red fingers and shuffling feet.
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18161212
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Momma called them Vaughens, "a outfit," and said, "they shoulda throwed the book at that Darla Jean."
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1816103
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She refuses to let her eyes cry. Her eyes played tricks on her and showed her one thing was really another. They don't deserve to cry.
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18161410
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18161411
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181662
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They stood at the intersection waiting for the light to change so they could cross the highway.
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181500
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—with spinster goddesses in the middle of things / circling looms.
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181552
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“It’s about basic working conditions!” she says, rubbing ice cubes on her nipples.
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18151310
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the ugliness will not be denied
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181521
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She stepped into a pair of high heeled slippers and began to dance. She was Salome, a witch, dancing like the most beautiful, the most skilled whores of Paris.
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181510
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At this time of night, the fluorescence makes his eyes bleed. The muscles in his legs are tight; walking's more of a necessity than anything else. Alexander pushes the shopping cart down the endless gray tile floors of the Grand Union on 35.
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181522
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Her face had that strange preserved quality Maybelle saw in many aging Boomer women — like an old toy never removed from its packaging.
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181565
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This is Jorge. He was a good little monkey. And always curious.Like the time he and his friend, the man in the amarillo sombrero, had to fly to Japan. *Jorge sat by the window. Watched the ground get further away. Until they were above the clouds. He looked out…
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181511
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Once, when I had not talked to you in a long time, I woke with your name in my mouth.
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181510
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I saw the little family that lives
under the neighbor's backyard deck
two weeks before while decapitating grasslets
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18141710
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“What are you doing, Maestro?"
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1814109
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The tiny green light flashing in the lawn of an apartment building one night that caught Roberta’s attention while we were walking home from Café Vita.
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18141615
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When I died, she said, she was going to have me cremated and put my ashes in the cats’ litter box.
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181476
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There’s not enough cigarette cloud to conceal her, malnourished and pale beneath blue and pink lights that summon 80s-era skate rinks. She saunters towards the center of the stage, asking her bored expression to convey detachment, while a DJ that fits the
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