1795 3 3
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The night wrapped its arms around us as we drove west, taking the highway past Medford towards Philly. The kids were asleep in the backseat and we were both counting the mile markers, staring out the windows with quiet eyes. I listened to the drone of the…
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179566
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He hung up and I sang some whiney lyric about wanting him back. You know the songs that say the same shit: I’m an idiot. Love me anyway. I’m Velcro with nothing to stick to and you’re a nappy surface that gives me a reason to exist.
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179453
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"I made up my mind then, in the backseat, sucking on a cherry Popsicle, that I wanted to be like Ruby’s mother..."
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179454
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The Lake I. When the weather was nice, the fisherman and his girl spread a blanket over the shore's rough sand and watched the cargo ships cleave their way to the…
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179441
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She'd always been an odd girl, nearly raising herself. As she got breasts and hips the boys complained that she was easy to get in the backseat, but afterward the car wouldn't run, not ever, like the engine died the moment they used her willingness up. So
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179482
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It takes twelve years for the hot water to run out and your skin has not even begun to prune.
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179464
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Outlined against the thinly layered darkness of the room, there is a silhouette of a small boy with his feet pulled up to the chin, failing to hold its own against the thousand stares from the deep violating the stillness of his room, their long familiarity with the…
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179471
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She doesn’t answer. Ten minutes slide by unmolested in the anesthesia of cheap wine and resignation, the bouncers blurring and unblurring, the room dimming, quieting, the kaleidoscope of sundown giving way to the gentle sadness of candlelight.
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179432
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That black hole isn't really a hole.
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17941210
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Later I asked Mark if he wanted to watch, but his wife wouldn’t let him. She didn’t like kinky stuff, she said.
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1794115
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The Americans don't want us. They want knowledge. They want to eat with us. They want technology and weapons. They want the results of research they themselves are too craven to perform, answers to questions they ask themselves in whispers, in the dark. T
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17942112
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the birth of a long, dark age//
where the wealthy will be eaten by the poor/
and the poor will be eaten by disease
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179471
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Scales were installed on station platforms. Those who were overweight were turned away
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179487
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179463
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I stand corrected once more.
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179444
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179353
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She asks if I only write about men, which I tell her is redundant. I also answer, “Yes, but sometimes I write about them as race cars, hyenas, vaginas, or God.”
She smirks like she wants to smile, but it’s stuck halfway out her door. Her happiness has
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17932015
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I said, “Marcy, Source Almanac is a guide for the Apple.”
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179394
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None of us took it too seriously when Gregory from underwriting said he was dating a real-life witch. Being an underwriter is not as interesting as say being a writer. That's why the greatest underwriter in America, Ajit Jain, gets paid per hour what Jame
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179300
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No way was Robert actually surprised that hewas competitive with himself, but there was something way more concrete about this. Instead of hand wringing, there was someone, Bob, that he could punch.
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1793157
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These days I wear a flag pin.
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179362
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cotton balls in your ears do not deafen you to the rocking of your mother's bed...as she and the new uncle set forth on the turbulent sea of their maiden voyage.
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179344
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At any moment, she'll come outside to pick up the day’s newspaper. He can see it resting beneath the blooming crape myrtle, its plastic wrapper glistening with dew.
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1793127
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What purpose other than misery/
can cancer serve? And Parkinson's,/
AIDS, and STDs?
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1793135
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That led to the first aid box on the bed at 3 in the morning, but what about those veggies?
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17932011
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We invent our beauties//
as we find them and engineer/
our horrors
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179386
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As he brushes his shoulders against other people's shoulders until he almost has no shoulders –
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179398
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. . . catching her breath somewhere between ecstasy and surprise. . .
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179240
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We were pushing ninety down the highway through a stretch of what rightfully should have been called the Badlands. We were both absorbed and coping with the rapidly escalating stages of desperation and so neither of us noticed when the yellow figure stepped…
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179252
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I imagined the sun to be the moon and discovered it was not on a road trip in California where I noticed the sun on one side and the moon on the other.
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