1644 1 1
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When we started plans for the party, none of us wanted Larry to die, most of all Larry himself.
Actually, when we first started plans for the party, Larry wasn’t dying.
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164421
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He repeated these six words like a prayer. His only confession.
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164451
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Two summers later, the ritual began. Carol left her house at midnight, having served her husband and daughter a heavy dinner that left them caged in their sleep. She was like a thief working in reverse: she rose from bed with her husband’s first snore,
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164400
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There were echoes all around them, their shadows delirious and only existed in short spurts under the breath of the streetlights. They danced as their cigarettes leaked calligraphy across the night sky and she tried to trace it with her finger. He asked her what it said…
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164472
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I must have been six years old at that time, but the events of…
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16441614
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They are all sleeping, but I know better. I will keep watch and if he comes tonight I will be alert and ready. When he arrives he'll see the slack mouths, the graceless sprawls, hear the grunts, snorts and snores of the other women and then he'll sense me. My eyes will…
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16441112
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Regrets lined behind him like crossties on a railroad track.
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164464
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It's that day in July when you feel really bummed because you can't find your favorite white sleeveless shirt that you wear on the hottest days of the yea
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164364
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We became The World Famous Shadow Puppet Theater because we thought that the best way to become world famous was to act as though we already were.
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164370
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I heard this story from my grandmother who heard it from her grandmother who heard it from an uncle, who was a monkey.
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164362
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Eddie meets Sarah Packard, a “college girl” played by Piper Laurie. She walks with a limp, a fact Eddie doesn’t notice at first because she’s sitting down at a diner table in a bus station. She’s alcoholic and writes poetry.
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1643106
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If you're a Boomer, your brain is teaming with decades-old Pop tunes that you just can't forget. The real reason you can never remember where you put your keys? Too many of your brain cells are clinging to every last lyric to “Fire and Rain,” “Free…
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164333
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By February, I had decided,
That you'd tear out my throat every morning
if it meant your favorite song would play from my neck.
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1643104
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I do this when I think of you. Today we took the first steps towards you're never here.
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164374
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Food is silly. Eating is silly. Yet the camaraderie of sharing a table is not silly. It is sacred. It becomes silly when the jello arrives.
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164320
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Contemporary persecution of Christians takes on milder forms of torture like having to explain away something Pat Robertson said, or constantly having to hear about Fred Phelps picketing funerals because he happens to hate homosexuals.
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164396
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Everyone loves a story of love
unrequited.
But what about the stories
of the unrequited lovee?
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164320
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In traffic I cry bloody murder, but my bloodlust subsides once I'm in Valhalla. Chip Whitehead wants to see me on the 22nd floor before I start my shift. Charlie and the other suits have been looking at me funny since I sent Chip a memo suggesting the recession…
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164388
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“I won't live here,” Beth said, waving her hand to indicate the small Southern town in which they were having dinner—the most delicious fried chicken either of them had ever tasted—in a restaurant located in an antebellum mansion. She looked…
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164365
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Cézanne sags during a moment of paint. There is an umbrella in the room whose surface collects his thoughts. Outside, in the rain, the grass and garden smell strongly of spring. Fruit litters the table. Light through the window writhes in conversation with shape and…
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164233
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two roses her eyes
aqua-blue
no, blue-green
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164233
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164245
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Paulette lived on the east side on Paulette Avenue. Mama dropped me off when we wanted to play Barbies. Her neighborhood was a little green lily pad in a swamp of blight and disrepair. A ghetto moat ringed around those three fancy blocks like a first line of defense,…
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1642125
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the memories return like they do every year at this time
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164297
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awfully evil decisions upstairs in your head that could come back to haunt you in your later years;I'm here to report your zooming about hair isn't really one of them. You have found the infernal wheel works in all four directions at once. Good for you.…
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164265
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The boy heard loud barks and squeals, climbed on a chair, and looked out the window at the barnyard and the faded blood red barn.
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164274
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He calls it an owl glass: he’s allowed: he’s six.
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164264
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"...innocent butterflies of pollution
trapped and entangled,"
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1642125
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I walked along the beach today, and there I saw them all; including the latest lost: little Tiven, Tommy, Michaela & my Paul. Grandma painted at her easel, set upon the dune. Uncle Eddie bent in half, laughing like a loon, Oliver growled…
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164253
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Twenty-two tornadoes tore through Toronto, spiraling steel and stone to the streets where she stood, texting her best friend.
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