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To Build a Fire

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One frozen hand protruded from the snow.

Florida

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Now, at last, she finds what she's been searching for. Worms. Like bitty pale larva, like half-moons of air trapped under fingernails. She thinks she sees one twitch; she blinks more furiously and hates herself for it.

Reverse Order

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Robert wants so badly after reading a book where a man wakes up as a bug to wake up as a bug. He researches the avenues of metamorphosis where science has been where it is going. He is disappointed that of all things science has turned into other things, none…

Roots

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My grandmother didn't like fireworks much. She said they reminded her of the raids during the war, when everybody stayed in the tube tunnels at night, going in buckets and curling up on the tracks.

Agape

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Every time Hector left his home he wondered if it was for the last time. It was Monday at 2:45, so he was standing in the bedroom near the tall mirror, staring into his dark eyes. In the past, she would lovingly help him dress with her tiny, perfect fingers. She…

Dad and the Red Light

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The light turns green.

Poems I Wish I Had Written

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Parsimony, Sage Advice, Alimony, and Time. That would be one. The Waste Land. The Hollow Men. The Red Wheelbarrow. There are others, But I have definite shoe anxiety dreams and can’t get over them. Do not Go Gently Into That Good Night. Alone

Dog

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I’m not the creative type like my friend Bosely, an Irish Setter. I’m a traditionalist. I like to eat exactly at 8:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. I take my bone with me everywhere I go. I will not carry the poop-bag.

Ages One Through Ten

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Age Eight: Custody battle. Reassure your worried mother that it’s alright, this will give you something interesting to tell your children one day. Until now, life has been very vanilla.

Win Some, Lose Some

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Afterward, at the motel, I asked her why she liked sex so much, and she said she liked the taste.

Just Do It

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He is sitting in his bedroom trying to decide what to wear. He has an appointment at five. If he wants to make it he has to either catch the bus, which comes in about fifteen minutes, or drive in. If he wants to drive in he needs to put petrol in his car,

Not Even Know It

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I remember the man well, though he didn't notice me.Even though a million tiny things happened to cause his hand to brush me away from his neck, he didn't notice. Much like the way his eyes bounced off women's bodies as he hurried down the sidewalk in his blue wool…

Song of Another Country

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And she warms her hands on fresh-cut gizzards, And he forgets the taste of honeyed peaches

Squirm

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“We should start a virgins' support group,” said Cindi one autumn afternoon. We were sitting in the bay window of the Campus Coffee Cavern ...

Sounding

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Grey would rather be in the trees or down by the river. When a wind comes up, he grabs the wooly blanket from the hook in the barn and calls Phoebe. They stretch the blanket out between them and sail into the grassy meadow that slopes down the hill from t

der Morgenmuffel

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I sat on the corner of her desk ... Angela Merkel can be a sweetie when she wants to be.

Librarians Love Me!

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Librarians love me, you want to know why? I don’t dog-ear pages, I don’t even try.

Lost

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I can't find my way back to the library. I've heard of this happening, that if you leave even for just one day and for a very good reason, as good a reason as mine, you may not find your way back. Now why should this be so? I do not understand this library. It houses…

Vera's Nemesis

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The dog was there before Vera was there, so she supposed she couldn't hate it too much. It wasn't like she had to live with the thing, either, though she might as well have hosted it in her ear for the eight months it took that particular batch of neighbo

Curry

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I looked around in my pantry but there were no sentences I felt like cooking.

Notes from Matrimony, # 9

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I arrived Sunday evening to a darkened house. Everything unplugged. Even the fuses from the breaker. Meticulous, this undoing. Silence has a sound. Cold has a voice, a pearly cigarette whisper. It says, “Metaphor?”

Naughty Alice -- There's No Laughter When You're Extinct

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Does life have an expiration date Alice asked herself? One must be careful when trying to deal with a broken person; you might cut yourself on their shattered pieces. Life can be like an arrow penetrating your heart. Hard and painful to pull it out, yet i

Stones

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Henry and I had met at the hospital. He'd been forty years my senior, but we'd been in for precisely the same reason: kidney stones.

Independence Day

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Not long ago, Owen the Second showed her a skull. He kept it in a brown cardboard box in the top of the closet. "My first wife," he said, and sneered, his lip bunching up around a scar just under his nose.

For the Woman Who Has a Hundred

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“What would you get? What should you give a lady who’s one hundred for her birthday?”

Karmic Tide

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Digging in another garden, jumping into another space and time, I impaled a toad on the tines of a garden fork. At first I thought the toad was a clump of clay, stuck to the thick tine, but before I could kick the clay off with my…

New Year's Eve

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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.

At the Fair

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You're on the Ferris wheel, and the wind is blowing just a little bit, and the sky is invisible behind a wash of white clouds, and your little yellow box tips when you look down, down to the fairway swinging. In the boxes below grandmothers are shrieking …

Assiduity Four

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Her clothing style varies from grunge to glamor and . . . she always looks good.

Where's My Phreakin' Nobel Prize in Physics?

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Where I went to college, you couldn’t swing a dead cat in a physics lab without hitting a Nobel laureate. I know–we tried. They finally made us stop–it wasn’t fair to the cat.