1801 3 3
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Behind the plastic kitchen, where the special children sometimes sit, a large boy in tight dungarees had grabbed Stephanie's hair in one fist.
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1801 1 2
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In the cicada's cry No sign can foretell How soon it must dieBasho "Hear the locusts?" The woman lifts the child's head. "Hear em, baby?" The child looks blankly in the…
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1801 7 1
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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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1801 2 1
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After only a few months’ practice I am able to dive deep within myself. Inhale. A millisecond stop and I am under the surface. I know there is something here within myself – some treasure that I have come to find.
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1801 6 6
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Ok, so I’m sitting here trying to write through a frigging cold. And I. . .Oops, . . . . . . wait a sec!. . . I’m stopped, astounded, stunned between coughing my left lung clear over my keyboard and watching it flopping on the back of my desk. . .
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1801 11 2
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I watched you knee deep in water with a little boy you were hitting.
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1801 10 1
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Her preferred post-coital activity is to pant, to suck in air with urgent greed.
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1801 4 3
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"I'll tell you one thing I don't want to see, armed confrontation, leading to domestic warfare."
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1801 8 7
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1801 6 6
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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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1800 9 4
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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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1800 5 3
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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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1800 0 0
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First thing each morning, Miss Murgy, a tall witch of a woman, cornered both of us like she did every day. "Girls…" with that she clinked a tea spoon on a shot glass, "do I have your attention?" "Yes, m'am," Vicky said. 6 a.m., six…
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1800 15 12
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She wears three or four tattered sweaters on cool days. She pushes a basket borrowed from a grocery store. There is a plastic lawn bag in the basket with God knows what inside.
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1800 14 7
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1800 4 4
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She couldn’t help but wonder what 93 year-old Sohrabjee looked for in the torn, dusty lithograph of Marilyn in Persia one of the orderlies had stuck to the wall of the corridor outside Jasmine Wing decades ago.
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1800 12 7
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What purpose other than misery/
can cancer serve? And Parkinson's,/
AIDS, and STDs?
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1800 4 1
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What about the goons? Those criminals thwarted and left for dead in every action movie for the past thirty years. I'm sure at least a dozen survived the slaughters. I'm sure at least one or two came out if it reformed. This one who quit working for Columbian drug smugglers…
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1800 11 6
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Altodog was dressed in filthy chef’s trousers and a long-sleeved purple dress shirt, somewhat dignified by a tattered black vest.
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1799 4 0
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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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1799 5 4
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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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1799 5 2
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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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1799 3 2
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It was hard to believe that, even very recently, there had been first days of school where nothing happened.
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1799 6 2
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he told me to be careful,my feet may bleedI watched him walk up and down the path,occasionally bendingwhy?carpenter nails, pieces of broken shinglesall along the pathnow I know why
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1799 8 7
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“Susan,” he says menacingly, as if he’s a husband who’s caught a cheating wife in a discreet liaison with another man. “I thought I made myself clear about this sort of thing.”
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1799 6 2
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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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1799 0 0
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A few people bristled and looked at Jim, but since he was avoiding their gaze, they had no choice but to return their attention to their own table and pretend to pay attention to the conversation they previously had been pretending to pay attention to.
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1799 4 4
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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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1799 12 9
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All young and loud and big and I swear her face like a lighthouse lamp, glowing—I remember thinking, ‘She’s drunk at nine in the morning.’
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1799 4 4
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I have a ball-pein hammer in my coat pocket.
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