1859 0 0
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Vito stood before the mirror combing his dark, freshly-cut hair. He trimmed his thick mustache, then buttoned his black vest. He liked its tight fit against his muscular torso. He had difficulty fastening the top button of his white shirt, the collar tigh
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185922
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Jacob could tell it was a man he had just walked past, a broken man with an olive green Vietnam era military jacket, a man who had probably served his country as honorably as anyone chosen at lottery and forced to kill for a subsistence wage…
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185911
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Before the bills, before the fighting, before the need to blame something, there was a moment blown empty in the span of one doctor’s breath, a moment where bar nights and weekend benders had no meaning, a moment where the future was as blank as the bac
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18591612
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The P-36 used for gunnery exercises was twitchy and stubborn...
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1859124
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It rises rigid and plumb from its heavy base, the severity of line yielding to grace only at the throat where it crests into a subtly constrictive pinch.
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185888
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and I can't help it if it is. I know it won't stay that way for long, but for now that's all I've got to work with, shining in my window, made of all eight fingers and a couple of thumbs. But the latest pushy words still want to give…
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185800
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"... Sometimes I think I'm so close to knowing what it's all about, to knowing myself, and then sometimes everything seems so hopeless, as if I haven't learned a thing."
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185844
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A man jumped off the High Level Bridge this morning.
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185863
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She shoved a small bottle under her aprons and came towards me, darkening the passageway from “Ancestor” by Thomas Kinsella The night I heard the Banshee she passed away. In my screaming fear dada and mama woke. …
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185830
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They sprinkled me in the holes of Auburn Maine. They covered me in grain, and salmon colored sand. My shell had swirls of chartreuse, and chocolate painted on it. I was made from glass and Gods left eye. Picked and sorted through, we all landed into a tiny paper bag…
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185800
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Solomon just makes people leak. Literally.
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1858148
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you may meet the man of your dreams.
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1858116
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She thinks she trusts this man; she wants to trust him. His face reminds her of a man who once took care of her on an airplane when she was a kid traveling by herself.
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185862
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So, when Daddy grabbed that cock by the neck and threw him into the hole that he quick covered with dirt, I knew right then that men would play a subservient role in my life going forward.
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1858135
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The Fuddy-Duddy Writer does not do wit.
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185800
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He went to the switchboard and rang one of the rooms. I moved away to a discreet distance so he could make his pitch in private, and soon he came back to the desk front. "He d-didn't like it much, b-but he said to s-send you up. Room 412."
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185800
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Once upon a time, not so long ago in Los Angeles, Jack and Jill Woodman’s father remarried.
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1857133
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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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185795
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Sundays after Mass, Sister Edburga gathered the team in the shower room, we stripped naked in a circle, held hands and said a prayer we’d win our game. A boy no one knew walked alongside her with a box full of jockstraps.
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185710
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"I read a cute animal story yesterday," I tell them. "And I was filled with rage. I can't live like this. There must be no more bears, or hamster-bears, or manatees, being hopeless and depressed. There must be no more cute animal stories—ever."
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185722
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Her wrinkles came into focus, the sort of old woman's face photographed for coffee tables and art galleries and corporate boardrooms, for prize juries and grant selection committees, and Luc searched his formidable memory for an exact match. Over the long, tedious…
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18571515
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I dreamt I was spinning down the coast in a convertible. It was warm, and the top was down.
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1857119
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What if I never feel like a real artist? What does it even mean to be a "real" artist? What if nobody ever cares about what I make?
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185741
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The DC-9 bounced in the turbulence over the north Pacific waking the dozing Ben Clarone.
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185676
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Alexander Ivanovich stuck out his leg and tripped Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev. Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev stood up, took two steps forward, stuck out his leg and tripped Alexander Ivanovich.
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185621
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The Kharal kept us safe, we knew, kept the colony functional in the oft belabored effort that was living our small, human lives surrounded by death, for in their ring of constant invisible protection, when they did not come, we thrived. It was not as tho
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185621
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The poet paused
Pen poised in hand
A wrinkle on his brow
He’d but to rhyme the final verse
The only problem
How?
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185663
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“3.9 million dollars,” she whispered to the window.
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1856159
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At the graveyard, the leaves had been raked into loose array....
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1856115
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What did they even invent
clothing for? I asked.
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