1586 10 6
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The trees would answer with a creak and a crackle.
Fall was near, a rotten apple.
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1586 4 2
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Had this been a film, I’d have seen you at once. Extreme close-up: my finger on the green button that opens the door to the park. Long shot: my leaving my bike at the entrance. Slow shot: my walking down the narrow stone path.
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1585 2 1
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“They say she lives alone out there.” “What, like out in the woods?” “Not like way back in a cabin or anything, but in a little house out there off the road. I'm not even sure she has a car.” “What, does she…
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1585 3 2
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I remember when I first came to California, I heard a mockingbird sitting in a tree, calling out in the names of other birds. It was down in L.A. I was staying at my brother's house in San Gabriel and driving in every day to the campus at UCLA to go to s
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1585 5 3
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“But I don't HAVE an accent,” she said. With an accent. “Tell him I don't have an accent, y'all.” Looking from one friend to another. Messy ponytail bouncing. I just stared. I may have blinked. A couple times. Every syllable…
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1585 5 3
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We sat in silence, the entire train, the few other passengers in anxious wait to see if I would change my mind. We all flipped pages, glanced up at each other, looked away when noticed.
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1585 1 3
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After he got on one knee, and she said, I do. After they watched the televised bombs disappear the city. After everyone fell asleep. After shock and awe, him and her making love…
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1585 4 2
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How hard it is to pretend to be someone else. Alone, together, in the silence... I thought about how you must really like me to act quite like that. I wanted to hold your hand and read the unsent love letters.
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1585 23 11
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Every Monday you brought your Sunday finest to the bus stop...
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1585 12 8
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fetal position can make a man seem small. harmless. like the child your womb won't carry...
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1585 2 2
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He just had to tell somebody. Anybody.
So he called up his publisher, L., who agreed to meet him at Oliveira’s for a drink. It only took about ten minutes to walk there from his big duplex in the Elmwood, where he was still living with his wife among
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1585 0 0
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1585 7 7
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You've been given some really cruel thoughts that are not your own.You've been given some really stupid sets of rules which are impossibleto follow. You can learn to manage for yourself. Remember who youwere before they told you who you were. You've been trainedsince birth…
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1585 7 1
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My mother was Irish as Paddy's pig. So all her family. Lovely people they were. Also, seldom seen among the Folk; stone cold sober. My father's family; Bavarian German. Bavaria's the wrong side of the German tracks. Frankfort people laugh at Bavarians as people in…
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1585 13 6
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1585 3 1
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As a rule, she calls me whenever she’s waiting for her train or bus. ‘Hiya… How’s life-’ she starts off sweetly. Even though I should know better by now, I can only respond in the same old way. I’ll say: ‘Hi Kate!’. Next, I’ll try to te
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1585 9 10
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For instance, my sister's husband. If I say brown socks, yellow boxer shorts, fishnet undershirt. If I say plastic bag and two tepid beers. And a voice that glides to falsetto when he: you're a tad too obscene for my taste, Julia, while he tries to light the filter end of…
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1584 7 7
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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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1584 21 11
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The lungs forsake their love of breath. The arms/
resist throwing off the small weight of sheets.
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1584 2 0
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A shot in the dark and everything goes black. It's as if the story never happened.
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1584 10 6
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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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1584 9 7
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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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1584 11 6
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A pinprick breaks the black/
and pins the spin of constellations/
around its still point.
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1584 3 3
|
Quimby’s eyes lit up. “Oh, lads, there must be a thousan’ ways to die at sea! I’ve made th’ Atlantic passage a good many time; lemme recount some manners of death I’ve witnessed with mine own eyes.”
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1584 7 5
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I got a sixth of a cow in the freezer
That’s not meant to be just a teaser
I guess all I’m sayin’
Come on home and you’ll be stayin’
Cause I got a sixth of a cow in the freezer
Got a rack and a half of ribs
I ain’t tellin’ you no fibs
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1584 11 8
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None of this is real, he says, and the path slopes down to a house that is possibly haunted. One always looks in such windows, one cannot not look at the predictable detritus of another's failure, a queer satisfaction, a fairy's dust. But no, not real, none of it. And…
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1584 7 5
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He plucks the feathers and winds thread to simulate an insect’s torso.
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1584 1 1
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The waves assisted in pushing him forward, until he reached the dry sand. He saw a small resort town ahead. The lights were out in the businesses and homes.
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1584 3 1
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The old man sat in the run-down shack, nursing his lobol-weed tea, and cursing the bitter cold wind outside.
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1584 9 7
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I want to tell you things you do not know.
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