1702 3 1
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Jane worked out of her new husband's suburban house, struggling to remember it belonged to her too. She shook off memories of years in a rented Mid-City shotgun, an old elevated dwelling that still seemed like home. It ended up with four feet of canal water…
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17011914
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Sure, to a teacher, life is a paper / but what would life be to a druggist?
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1701125
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I can’t stop looking at the burly man to my left with the blue lips and three-inch mustache. He orders his fourth whiskey. He laughs at my melancholy like it was a flat thing--a dead animal to strip of its fur. Why be melancholic when you can float on whi
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1701127
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Emma and I were in a shabby part of town with vacant lots and overgrown yards, and I wondered if something would happen as we loped beside Tom, who was slow-witted and 21. We were 13 . . .
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1701105
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It’s a song you knew once, begin to remember now: You’ve had this dream before.
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170131
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I don’t know what happened. One day I was in her room, groping the various drawers for hidden condoms, glimpses of women’s undergarments and I found a spectacular pair of blue lace panties
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170151
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‘Oh, and try these. ' She handed me a plastic baggy full of seeds that resembled watermelon seeds, only smaller. ‘If these don't work your problem runs deeper...'
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170175
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skies electric blue,/limpid dewy air, the world/framed by a small farm.
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1701108
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nothing can stop a group of genteel Southern women from a card game, and divine intervention makes one's participation in such an event quite worthwhile
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170000
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Allen would stroll the remains of the orchard, reminiscing with Tad, flirting with dementia.
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170000
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The year is 2110. The earth is no longer habitual for human beings. The oceans are gone, the sky is red and radiated and the last vestiges of human civilian are located within the confines of massive barrier cities. For a century mankind has been at war w
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1700133
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The spoken world is bigger than I had ever imagined it to be, wonderful and relentless and unforgiving, and to be a part of it was my grandest childhood fantasy. I don’t know what the world sees me as now, but inside I will always be a stutterer.
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170043
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The scaffolding had been difficult to construct. The rock floor of the bluff offered no purchase, so he'd been forced to anchor braces to the trees behind, then span some thirty feet. A cantilevered gallows reached another fifteen feet past the stage...
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1700138
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I’m aware I will never be a woman the night you leave me for another city
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1700174
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It was in the spring of 1958 when I first arrived in Kobe, Japan, traveling aboard a Norwegian merchant ship, looking to make movies on a limited budget. Superior quality cameras, lenses, and film were being produced in Japan at a fraction of the cost for similar products…
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170010
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and we got the apartment, which was on a street that backed up on an alley situated, as it turned out, right across the alley from the very first Hari Krishna house, where they would wake up at four every morning and begin their maddening chanting: Hari K
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170022
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In principle, Sergeant Brock Lumley resisted superstition, but if you were to stop him on any given day he was patrolling Baghdad streets with his rifle squad and ask him to open the front left ammo pouch on his flak vest, he’d get this look on his face..
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17001912
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A screaming comes across the brain
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170030
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after several beers this woman told me once/(when I was maybe 15)
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170000
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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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169941
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The SS and Gestapo began rounding us up, at least those who aren’t registered, those without yellow cards, today. Rumor has it they got at least 1,000 and took them to the camp, to the barracks. I tried not to watch and only listened, only heard some of t
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169901
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you'll call it jealousy, but i promise youit's really not, because i wouldn't liketo have your life any more than i wouldmine. because really, i lead a life notunlike that of a housecat, knockingaround and getting spooked by closingdoors when i know nobody is in. what…
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169932
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Teaching never occurred to me in college. I took workshops and wrote often. Friends and classmates, meanwhile, switched from studio majors to Art Education, or from English to Certification. Not me. Teaching high-schoolers would be all wrong. Briefly, I…
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169900
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"If only we could all look like that."
"Truly lovely … such a perfect face."
The gallery was busy that day.
But still the man and woman stood.
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16991511
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They say, we have hangnails.
I say, I have a bruised leg.
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169994
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The blood from my palm runs across the rocky surface of the shell. I push the knife into the crease again, searching for a weakness, the one space where the two sides will gasp and then separate. You tell me it doesn’t matter.
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16991510
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On the birthday before he started school, he received a pencil case from his paternal grandparents. The violet, oblong pouch contained a pencil and a pencil sharpener in the same color. He didn't remember what had happened with the pencil or the sharpener, but he had…
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169933
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And him, now there’s a him. I’d like if he were perfect, but perfect things never are. My daughter says it best, when she contrasts the two of you, “Daddy worked to forget about his problems. When he works, it makes him feel like there is a problem.”
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169910
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And so the man-faced boy grew alone, knowing little of kindness and love. As he grew, he explored the limits of his cold world; crawling in dusty nappies, toddling in hand-me-down rags, at last walking on worn sandals, haunting the edges of human life loo
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16992118
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After the funeral there was a luncheon in the church basement.
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