1608 20 11
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The box thuds at your feet: mug, plant, wedding photo, the 25-year pen.
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160821
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The chipping sound started around the time Susannah reached puberty. Not all at once, it was just now and then at first.“What's that noise?” she'd say, and everyone would cock their heads to listen. Her mother eventually took her to the doctor. He said it…
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1608112
|
Although radiation and chemo rendered him a wraith...
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16081611
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160863
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My fingers are shining
in the underwater afterlife of memory
searching for the nipple-sized mollusks
searching for the solid nature of things
left over from having lived a life
at all
That new rain smell, specifically
I remember that,
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16082111
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Guys on safari wearing safari jackets shoot things all day, things with funny names …
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16081911
|
Today the isobars are far apart.
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160866
|
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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160722
|
I've never really been impressed with authors that write long teary-eyed novels about people dying of terrible diseases or uplifting stories about the armless boy who made the wrestling team.
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160710
|
It’s the small stuff. Always. A conversation with a stranger, brief yet so connected it overwhelms you. These encounters can move me beyond my reality, little reminders that, if you just crack the window a little, something very special can blow in.
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1607148
|
And she's dying like someone who's tried living and failed.
|
160710
|
[He] practiced aromatherapy and licentiousness, in no particular order.
|
16072210
|
Let’s play a game. I’m thinking of a word.
Do we have to?
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1607147
|
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1607109
|
Strike me down hard, bolt of pure blue, laser focus square, blast of hydrogen nuclear, knock me on the keister, blind me down, oh Lordy Lord Lord.
|
16071211
|
Bag worms hang in their cloudy white hammocks. This is the month of webs when long-bodied yellow and black spiders sign their autographs.
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1607103
|
When she was nineteen, she began to brew a baby in her belly. She named it, and sang to it, and organized the leftover hand-me-downs that hadn't been worn ragged through by the first seven sets of recipients.
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16071410
|
When we take Vengeance,/
shave and shower him,/
deodorize and scent him,/
clothe him in a starched shirt
|
160754
|
He reveled in the chase, giddy when just out of arm’s reach. When to catch him, that was the question.
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16071812
|
He spends his Sunday morning spraying WD-40 through the straw-like stream attachment at the expansive paper nest of beige and ivory striped wasps.
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1607116
|
One must not confuse the meaning / of life with the joy of living
|
1606119
|
My wife is making lunch. I suggest leftover pizza. We are going over to the neighbor’s house for pizza tonight, my wife says. I tell her that’s okay. I like pizza.
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160600
|
The sound of drums blared from down the street. Car horns tried to fight the sound. Mayumi and Keiko saw the size of the crowd walking past them increase.
|
160620
|
...to know something people around you don’t know can put you outside of them. And then you can’t get back in...
|
160600
|
What's the protocol for telling people your spouse has cancer? How do you tell your son, your friends, your co-workers? How do you tell your mother? How do you tell her mother?
|
160611
|
Trollo Martinez was wearing a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and an old LA Community College T-Shirt. He needed to find some water so he could down the 5milligram tab of Ritalin in the palm of his hand.
|
160620
|
‘Just get out of bed,’ I reply. ‘It looks like the fairies have been at your head. You should turn your clothes inside out. Put out a biscuit. Ring a bell. Buy a rooster; or a recording of it crowing. It will keep the sprites at bay.
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160652
|
I know what he meant.
I've been in the 3 A.M. cream cheese.
I've known the hole in the bagel.
|
160686
|
I knew my cat was capable of telepathy when I began to have isolated, random, non-cause-related thoughts about food and feelings, little signals, and I realized that the signs — images of tangerines, tuna, bones; the idea of choice; slate, names; the feeling of…
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160675
|
—You must be joking, he laughed.
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