1749 7 5
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The man and the lady loved to laugh. She would tuck her hair back and lay her head on his stomach after dinner while watching old scary movies on Thursday nights. She would listen to his stomach digest the food and laugh then, he would laugh and…
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174953
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Smoking is like hooking up with an ex-girlfriend: you know she's bad for you and that it won't work out, but it feels so familiar and comfortable and so easy to slide back into.
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174942
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I imagined the crystals in my mouth.
Salt flowers blooming on my tongue.
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174896
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A horizon shrinks a burden until it’s a seagull getting fat off vinegar fries. I’m in love with the way your mouth moves when you aren’t talking. When it fills with salt.
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174865
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There’s a hole in my sock, just large enough that my big toe keeps slipping out.
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174800
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The museum’s catalog description changed much less than the painting over those years. He wasn’t curator-in-chief of catalog descriptions, however, that task went to a curator arriving by another door.
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1748102
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She was about 35 or so and noticeably pregnant. She was near hysteria when she knocked on our apartment door, right across the street in L.A. from a convent. But she took one last desperate wild look at me, standing at the door. I saw the animal in her ey
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174821
|
She saw no sense in waiting. Waiting was a weakness.
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174884
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When Roger was small his two favorite toys were a tiny, squat doll called Care and a rubber millipede.
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17471813
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Taken by agents of the United States of America, Felix Six-Killer grows up at the Carlisle Indian School near Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. His hair is cut and oiled. His shirts are starched and creased. For months he is startled to find himself seated for…
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17472011
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The box thuds at your feet: mug, plant, wedding photo, the 25-year pen.
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174776
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She tells me I have to face the fact that I have the heart of the Tin Man. I know the story. He had none. She is very sensitive and I have to measure my remarks because words bruise her so easily. So, I…
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174761
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In his mind, he could hear Eve’s voice, “We had some good times, didn’t we?”
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174754
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Quail looked up at her. Unsmiling, challenging.
Lemme just go wash my hands, he said.
She closed the door, bolted it. You won’t need your hands.
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174710
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My only celebrity anecdote involves seeing Barbara Bush in the back of the Presidential limo ...
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174785
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Twice burned, it buries its graves.
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174764
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We need to keep writing
because the great ones
aren’t always that great
We need to keep writing
to insure that the future
even has a future
We need to keep writing
because the wind won’t know how
or when to listen if we don’t
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174796
|
I cannot begin to list all the ways this conversation can go downhill from here, so I hang up the phone quietly.
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174622
|
I remember thinking the seasons are arriving later every year,
as if the world has been slowed by the weight of graves.
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174621
|
‘Miguel! A pint of Guinness, please!'
I might as well have asked for his mother's immortal soul. A smile as benign as a stiletto. But he served a clean and tidy pint.
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174654
|
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174652
|
We lay in what we have made, minute fleshy bullets in the target we have made.
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174611
|
...the loving and very painful hurt of our daily sustenance
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174600
|
After Jonesy entered the bear habitat, he walked up to the biggest bear in the group and punched it square in the nose. The bear was visibly startled. I mean, bears don’t get punched that often. And there’s a reason: bears are ferocious animals.
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1746178
|
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174642
|
There were three other guys on the bus. The landlord (or buslord) let us use the kitchen and bathroom in the house he shared with his wife. I rode into San José City College with the other guys, who were also taking classes there. I remember frigid autum
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174662
|
"What the fuck are you looking at, Carl?" She snaps, turning her head toward me as the truck edges off the road and into a field of tobacco, into those broad green leaves of ancient sacristy and modern ablution. This is not a blissful kind of field. It is not full…
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174600
|
When he suggested to her that they make a sex tape, because that’s what everyone was doing, she wasn’t really surprised. And there was a truly repugnant part of it that fit in with her desire for moral self-flagellation.
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174664
|
the first day of preschool/ my mother walked me down the street/ to a tall building that cut/ like a knife made of bricks/ right into the street,/ an american flag/ sticking straight out/ just above the door.
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174632
|
She looks exactly like my sister, though I do not have a sister.
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