1632 1 1
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Each step you take on the pitchEach mile driven downEach closed exit of highway Blocked avenues of importanceBoarded up HammeredNailed shutPeople and places and things You can't get to anymoreThe knife and the needle The black and the…
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16321011
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She left knives and hot pots with handles akimbo. Like a guardian angel, he turned them in. Like an ungrateful Eve, she turned them back out.
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163213
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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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163221
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Slipshod shoes were the first sign of a meltdown. Sometimes she could see it coming. A prickly gentleman washing his clothes on a Thursday afternoon. One week he’s fine. Nothing wrong with owning a sour face. The next Thursday, his shoes don’t match.
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163288
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His mother was a ballerina.
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1632148
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His wife had just come from the gynecologist and was toying with her French fries.
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163253
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“There’s no real freedom in this world. But a car and the open road is close enough for government work.”
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1632106
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Eight days before her 50th birthday they were married in their soft new pajamas, holding hands on his bed in the hospital. The pastor and witnesses wore protective hospital gowns and gloves; the patient was in isolation once again. A special dispensation from the head…
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163243
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Many years ago I visited a nude beach. I undressed at the car and walked with my companions onto a California beach as naked as the day we were born.
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163285
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The army was bulldozing grandmother's house.
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163256
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IN nature, it's hard to find a straight line. Stand on a beach. Look out to sea. There out far you might think you see a line where the sky comes down to join. Where two fields of blue meet. But where you're not quite sure for the line is a blur there. You…
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1632179
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Words darken with smut and irony over time.
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163143
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The print is not ideal, it's true.
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163197
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The Girl with a typewriter mouthhas a body like a single sheet of blank white paper. I wasobsessed with the Beatles, she tellsme. Well, there are worse things to beobsessed with, I tell her. No, shesays, I mean REALLY obsessed. Oh,is all I can think to reply to…
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1631146
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She drinks a chocolate martini. I fold myself up and slide into her pocket.
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1631179
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Shakespeare had red hair / Van Gogh never painted a nude
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163143
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We decide not to go to the emergency room
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163153
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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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163143
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Atlanta, 1990The night we almost died,crushed at a one-hit wonder concert,comes back to mewhen the club announces it's closing.An ancient excelsior millturned industrial dance hall,I spent three years mapping every dark corner, finding secret places for sex and…
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163187
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tumbling for you from afar as close-up. They will rewrite your dancing form like a proper magical spell on all their maddest days, using the branches of cherished trees dipped into the trapped wells of certain hosts of …
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163163
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It was only a dream. No one died, nor were they even harmed. So horrifying!
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163100
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When we talked about the lasagna, we were, I see now, talking about different things. I.e., I was talking about lasagna, and you were talking about almost everything but. You weren't talking about the dry, burnt noodles or…
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163133
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Things looked way too normal to be normal. The cold, gliding black eyed swans never once straying far from each other's wake, the cute blue jeaned lovers everyone secretly watched carefully picking their trickling way over small odd rocks and…
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163100
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Tadd Dameron once described himself as “the most misplaced musician in the business,” and one needn’t call the missing persons bureau to determine that he may have been right.
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163100
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At 7:30 that evening my brother knocked on Parker's front door. When I went to let him in, sweat was running off Darrell's head like he'd been hit by a water balloon. The air was absolutely unmoving, and there was the smell of tar from the asphalt in th
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163162
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All I wanted to do was lay in his smell, I had missed him and didn’t know it before now. He got up to urinate at one point and his absence was obscene to me.
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163165
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When I first started out in my working career, I made it the habit of obtaining jobs with companies that were about to go under. (I wrote more books while on unemployment than by any other method.) I was a real bloodhound at sniffing out the pre-dawn od
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163195
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The instant you remember
gratitude
with enough focus to spring free its power...
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163100
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"Look at the grime on those curtains. Not fit for an Emperor. Pull them down. Put up fresh new ones. Not a spot."
"Oh! Look at this throne. All uneven legs. The gems are not shining. The gold looks dull. Fix it, fix it, fix it!"
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163143
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