1487 5 3
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I sat at the kitchen counter, aware of a heaviness, a numbness, in my flesh, my bones, my mind. My dancer's body -- short, trim and 108 pounds -- felt as huge and unmoving as the…
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1487107
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For you have waited. And waited and waited. And soon your slice of bread will be ready.
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148700
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Ever since they switched from paper scripts to the little rubber balls branded with code I have been inundated with sickness.
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1487179
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Words darken with smut and irony over time.
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148655
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There was a certain romanticism in it, the salty old man sidling up to me at a bar, rhapsodizing in a slurred stream of conscious about the state of the world, the country, the state of his own heart. He didn't have an eye patch nor beard, nor was he…
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148652
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“I would like to keep my head, at least for a few more nights. Didn't you say we were gonna have sex one of these days? Isn't that in the manual?”
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148611
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But Jake doesn't hear anything. He is pure, unfiltered, liquid rage. Jake kicks Rolex dude once, twice, five times in the ribs. On the last kick, there is a snapping sound.
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148665
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Ivan was used to explosions, but this was high in the sky. He was on his back between tall sunflowers that grew infinitely in all directions. The blast made the flowers bow their heads. Bits of debris fell from the blue sky, some shiny, trailing fire or smoke. The boy…
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148631
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The TV projects from an insect arm. It has the face of my ex-husband, smiling and void. I like to set small fires and inhale them.
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148620
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You held my hand when I hit the ground and told me the shakes would start soon.
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148611
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Route 346 is the way Pop drove to Troy long after everybody else took Route 2. Today Charlie and I drive in the opposite direction. Back then, Pop drove us to Troy on Route 346 on Sunday afternoons with the car windows…
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148665
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Resting bitch face strikes again.
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1486158
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She is too stylish to be crazy, is what the migrant probably thinks. And he's right.
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148621
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My buddy had been in the computer business, a systems analyst. Surely there would be some mention of him online. But there was nothing. Nothing, that is, until I saw the obituary.
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148665
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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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148611
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I have hired a relationship consultant. He helps me through conversations with my wife.
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148631
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The blackout lasted longer than anyone thought. From my fifth story window, the whole city seemed to shut down. I heard noises above me. How could it be?
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14851810
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I loved without marriage and the men loved without divorce and we loved a twenty-four-year-old eating and how gracious she shone over a tame bottle of beer.
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148562
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It was only two days before Christmas. Jonathan remembered his mother crying.
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148574
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I don’t know what to do with all this money flowing from my books.
It’s burning a hole in my literary pocket.
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148521
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On the other pillow is a ladybird which escaped from a dream. It reminds me of when I was a tiny red polka dot. And then bigger, and other colours. And then… I stare at the ceiling, searching its soul for little things. The ladybird touches my arm, whispers…
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148533
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I am speeding on the highway at 2AM because no one is here...
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148500
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The bullet split her head in half before she could finish her sentence. Her blood sprayed out onto my face and covered my lips. The taste of life as it suddenly ended.
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148520
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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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148598
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On my twenty-second birthday, in the spring of 1979, I had a crawfish boil, my first. Ninety pounds of red mudbugs on a picnic table spread with newspaper, my birthday cake sitting at the end of the table like an afterthought.I hadn't…
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14851411
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chains across all the old doors
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1485106
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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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148531
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Nothing is ever hoarded in our house, everything is eaten.
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148565
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In your mouth is the attic studio
Where your father’s brushes lie wet with water
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1484104
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The next day I can’t recall at all, a waste, like the flash of twenty years of my life, faces that pass you like comets in some erogenous unnamed zone of night, but they got me in some isolation room with my wrists in leather restraints.
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