1691 6 5
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This writers' conference (sponsored by VQR, which had run its banner ad atop the Fictionaut home page in the summer of 2014, which begins to explain both my attendance and this essay) revealed itself as an apt subject . . .
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16911011
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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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169142
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It's 6:45 a.m. A gritty, mundane sort of magic pervades the air at "Valentine’s" in the Hamilton Hotel.
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1691136
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It wasn't so much the softness of the bed that kept her from sleep, or the pungent bleach-scent of the unfamiliar sheets, but the lack of her clock's familiar tick, tick, tick. Or was it a missing heartbeat? Awake, she watched his chest. On the table, an empty pill …
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169131
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"I have a prehensile tongue," he said matter-of-factly. "I know how to make you feel good." Such confidence, I say. Prove it.We're sitting on the couch, watching a movie, but not paying attention to it. We sit side-by-side, my leaning into him, and his arm is around me,…
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169189
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Mr. Blumberg and I sat side by side on a small couch in the family room. He was watching a football game on TV.
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169120
|
One day when they were sitting on the curb together at 4th Street and Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa and Joe was calling out to passers by in a singsong voice, “Spare change for cigs,” she had persuaded them that they should try to join the circus.
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169111
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I never could run properly. It’s kinda hard when you’ve got scales all over your body and a big fat tail that gets in the way.
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169100
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You’re never really asleep. I am never awake. But as the darkness fades, I read. Your body tells my story.
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169163
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—Frank, how is your sex life?
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169143
|
|
169155
|
there should be a word for it.
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169131
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I’m secretly hoping for a huge bouquet, a fruit basket, a pickle jar of urine in a lunch bag on my doorstep, even.
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169144
|
I imagine diving into a vat of dried fruit, enjoying the unmistakable sweetness in each shriveled morsel, until I find myself biting into an undetected metal shard.
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16901212
|
Not only half-full/
but stress-fractured
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169074
|
I went to the lake,to our spot. there were daffodils there.i smiled at that, then cried a little.you want to hear something funny?they scare me. they are so, so yellow.they scream caution.I almost keep walking, but the sun is out, and I am…
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169076
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The note was a lie, multiplied through each member of its potential audience....
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169055
|
beat them with fists and purses.
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169052
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Send me a secret story in a song just for me
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1690158
|
I paid the doctor / You paid the doctor
|
169095
|
I fully intend to show Hamilton the delights of soft Oriental carpeting and a delicious new position I learned not long ago. It involves a silk scarf, a leather strap and some aromatic herbs.
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16901911
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|
169098
|
Everybody called her The Crier because from time to time we would hear her crying.
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169020
|
She dips a toothpick in ink, running prick over paper, simply to prove herself wrong.
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169077
|
"We're practicing," she signs, "for an earthquake."
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16901410
|
Microscopic purposes emerged//
with their combinations and permutations
|
168921
|
“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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168900
|
“A shibboleth is a test—a way to separate da wheat from da chaff that's as old as the Bible, but as new as the latest trend in men's fashions,” Gus says.
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168933
|
Trisha dreamed of being a Playboy Bunny since the days she still had buck-teeth and fried egg boobs. She blu-tacked page threes above her bed-head and had me snap topless Polaroids till they littered the floor. She told me to imagine she had 36DDs and per
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16892014
|
I become the accumulation/
of appetites
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