1719 5 3
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Maybe you, citizen, should be a jerk. Jerks get where they are going. You, citizen, what about you? Handy, dandy, where’s the jerk? Conformists. Sheep. All of you, all of us, boiling out our radiators. Spending our day, our days, our lives in coope
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171877
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As spilled on a sandy Corona del Mar beach/both in moonlight and starlight so lovely/and strangely sad as if receding still
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171800
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“Imagine a Shakespearean scholar coming upon an undiscovered work by the Bard. That’s how thrilling this is."
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17181511
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171800
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After seventeen years of struggling to wake up early in the morning, I had managed to wake up on my own. Actually, I think it was because I was unable to sleep that I was up so early. I had laid on the bed all night, staring at the dark ceiling, taking in every…
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171832
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Each time his eyes closed, he shook off the sleep, whimpered, and opened them wide again. I’d never watched a baby fall asleep before, but I realized at that time that falling asleep could be a scary thing. The world gets fuzzy and starts slipping awa
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171852
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Ben considered his options in the taxi to Charles De Gaulle airport.
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171811
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My sister, Bonnie, is busy with the dishes as I enter the kitchen; I toss the mail I was sorting through onto the table and look around for Sophie, my four-year-old daughter. "Bonnie, isn't she ready…
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171831
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"On the podium at Pride, he owned that he'd loved taking his children to playgroup as he got to ogle all the breast-feeding mothers. "
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171831
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It was cloudy, the way he liked it -- no baking in the sun. People passed occasionally. He sniffed at the joggers, “Health Nuts,” he dubbed them. He hadn’t exercised since his last high school gym class.
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171811
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171892
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Public Wi-Fi ”hotspots” allow men and women to ogle each other discreetly while pretending to write the Great American Novel.
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1718106
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The trees would answer with a creak and a crackle.
Fall was near, a rotten apple.
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171755
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You will never know how much it hurts
When someone else touches your face.
But I also know how much you count on others
To pull the slivers out of your heart.
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171763
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There’s an unending parade of drifters, outlaws and crazies and I always have to watch my back, but, then again, that’s nothing new.
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171700
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Scott was sure his father was reassured by the sticky stains in his Penthouse; Dad found them when Scott was thirteen. Dad had just one issue of that venerable porno, which Scott defiled with his joy. It was not the Penthouse models…
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171700
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Under the darkness of their new city. The heave and moan of structures as they breathed and pulsed. Under the darkness of this city, under the hum of their florescent bulbs and the tumbling rattle of motorcars, the wheeze of their machines and the clank o
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171745
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. . . it's all we ever want -- the holding.
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171778
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“You should've let him drown,” she once told me. Doesn't she see that I did? I'll let her drown, too.
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171764
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Here are some ideas for stories I have had. 1. A captain of a whaling ship loses his leg to a whale, and makes it is life's mission to find this beast and kill it, and make a pair of boots, belt, and wallet out of its skin. 2. Ten people are invited to stay the weekend at a…
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1717116
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Even in the fading light, it looked big enough to disembowel a man.
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171710
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While the tea was steeping, Ms. Darcy unwrapped the package. The book was lovely. It had nice heavy paper and the print was a good size for reading. The cover was glossy and not too showy, and Ms. Darcy thought it would look just right on her shelf.
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171700
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Ahead, she heard voices. She approached very slowly, as quiet as possible. She knelt behind a pair of shrubs and peeked through a small opening.
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171745
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. . . a visitor from the preceding century would have been aghast to the point of vomiting to behold the regard with which pandas were now held almost universally.
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171765
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When I got to Pete's house he was sitting on the curb smoking a cigarette, bruised and dirty, with a smoking pile of rubble behind him where his house used to be. I hadn't heard yet, but his ol' girl left him and blew up the house when she left.
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171787
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I was at Mike's place when the call came. My brother sounded so accusing that I wanted to punch him in the face. But he was way upstate. "Dad died today," he said, as if I could have somehow known or prevented it. It was sudden. A heart attack. He was…
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1717156
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Call it a spell or a prayer or a ritual; it worked.
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171744
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She wakes up with rosemary.
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17171513
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I asked the hospice nurse about maggots.
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17171711
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Pholcidae...Daddy Long-Legs
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