2125 25 9
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When I was young I used to carry a butcher knife to bed. My grandmother placed it in my small hands before tucking me in.
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2125289
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People huddle in their basements like kittens. People laugh, darkly, saying they'd rather be surfing. People wonder if their batteries are charged. People never do get what they want. People grow tired of the sad dog following them around. People want you to know how…
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21242820
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I popped open the wine
with a Nike shoelace, a trick I learned on the internet
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2124189
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I thought of driving over there across town, steering with buttered hands.
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2123910
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"This story isn’t about you, even if it seems as though it is."
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212275
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Montauk was the solution. He had no job, no money. He could stay for the winter at the summer place. It would be a lark. He had come home to Great Neck after losing the last job and they were making broad hints at him to move…
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212231
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There are gestures, unmarred by the words put to them after all has failed. When Y. stopped you from talking to apply lip balm to your dry lips. Or she sidled up to you to read what you had written for her. When you lay on the grass together she put her head on…
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2120118
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Lisa Duncan's mom was puffy, and you could always see part of her breasts.
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211764
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Human being: a fruit or vegetable with animal aspirations and a mineral destiny.
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211751
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He didn't think there would be girlish confidences, hopes, dreams but he is shocked, appalled, by the little boys aging at ten-speed, already wizened old men ready for cancer and heart attacks with toy trucks in their hands, skeletal women beloved by men
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21141515
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isn't so hard to imagine if you can just squint through the minutes like a good McGoo, slog through the headline happy seasons and sleep at it most of the day. It only hurts real bad whenever you try to carry off a roaring laughter…
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211400
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Why does he beat you, Suraiya had asked one day, looking at the dark, mottled bruise on the side of her head one morning. Why don’t you leave him?
How can I possibly, Sadhana said, surprised that one Indian woman (whom she’d thought once was so much lik
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21121110
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‘Last week,’ I said, ‘on the radio, there was a competition. The DJ played a sound-bite of a car going over a cattle grid, and people had to phone in to guess which cattle grid it was. I didn’t phone in, but I knew the answer.’
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2112143
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He pounds the roof of the Pontiac with the side of his fist and it rumbles like a timpani. He raises his head to light and wipes the sweat from his forehead. There's no sense in fighting it. He will go back and knock on Peter's door.
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211294
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It was there, and then it wasn’t, the victim of a magician or a swooping seabird.
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211100
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Even though I made the phone call, it was really Steven who put me on that plane. I wanted to fly out at dawn. "Let's wait till after breakfast," he said. "Change to a later flight." By that time everything was sold out except a few seats on Doomed Flight…
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211153
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It came from the animal shelter, seizing and shivering, with eyes almost bigger than its head. Eyes that followed Pearl like it couldn’t stuff the whole picture of her in its tiny skull.
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21102914
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21094133
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I need to get in and out, you say.
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21092516
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The last time they made love she could feel the hint of pain and loss which would become her.
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210711
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The lard-arsed ol’bastard struggling
soot-faced and yelling. . . .
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210722
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Dan leaned back on his haunches and smoked. He was a massive man, not the type to sit like that. But he did. He sat like that, smoking and he said: “I feel like this kid I went to school with. Everybody called him Squish-Squash.” We asked him…
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21072823
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the waves all green and gooey, all / pommes frites, ruinous, insolent, half / fractal
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210762
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The first time we fucked my face was squashed between a seatbelt buckle and the right-side door.
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210662
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Each mobile unit carried an Alsetex grenade launcher for dispersing tear gas. Any group of five or more people was deemed suspicious and immediately dispersed by roving patrols.
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210643
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The rapist was caught on December 23rd, the day before Christmas
Eve. Everyone in town was surprised to learn he had a wife and two children; a son and a daughter, the same age, and a yellow Labrador retriever.
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2105227
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The first thing she remembers is sunshine, then her own dawning, and feeling the lumps on her head and bruises on her face and pain in her heart and aloness of her soul.
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210421
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Cast off unexpectedly,Surety stood watch on distant shore.A wordless beckoning,A siren's callpierced waxed ears.Lashed to the mast,Who helms this vessel,This beating heart?
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210399
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One morning, she used a few prim phrases to break up with me. She had her suitcases packed by lunch. She was gone by dinner. Two weeks later, she emailed me a picture of herself sitting on a small brown couch.
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210332
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Things have happened.
It’s a given. What, are you crazy? Of course things have happened. It’s the world, for Christ’s sake. Things are happening. I am consistently missing most, if not all, of them.
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