1098 4 3
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I still see Big Mama leaning over her garden to pick a zinnia to put in her still life. Her old pink slip, hanging diagonally a foot under her hiked up, ragged, stained dress, half covered by her paint smock, which matched her white, faux fur, bedroom sli
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109832
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while you peed on that little old lady's begonias
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109842
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Great Uncle did stunts in silents and shot a man in a cowboy one-reeler, then vanished to the hills like Roy Earle in High Sierra.
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109753
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Magdalena followed the receding tide, her tiny feet leaving no rumors in the hard sand. She gathered only the most beautiful shells and presented them to her waiting Abuela. Her grandmother told her that the only things that a woman truly owns are her dreams. She told her…
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109700
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Alysia grabbed her luggage and rolled it behind her. Looking up at the sky, it was nighttime. She could see the crescent moon above, adding to the darkness.
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109752
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Once there was a man who wrote in code. He was comfortable among substitutions
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109700
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One cold winter's day she met what she thought was the love of her life. He had everything going for him but his age. You see the sweet young thing was a lot younger than her. One might say that she had lived many lives before he had been born.
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109710
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1097138
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Spying is a different concern. Privacy also. I feel there is a loss of privacy just in believing or realizing it is possible; our forebears did not experience loss of privacy digitally, perhaps in another way.
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109783
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“Who says?” she purred in reply
“They all do” he countered smiling , chewing on an ice cube
“All of them, huh?”
She leaned forward, raising a wicked left eyebrow and whispered,
“And just who are they, anyway?”
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1097117
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She had just done it in the backseat with the man she decided would be her father. Or maybe it was the cast of his eyes under the dim bar lights. Maybe she insisted that this had to be done, to relive the night under the stars, under a dented roof of a station…
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109711
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I would open an eye, waiting for it to absorb the scant light in the room, and I would see her on the far edge of the bed, the topography of her hips now a battlement to keep me at bay.
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109710
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1097910
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That evening she sat on sofa and sniffled and twisted her handkerchief with her fingers. I decided it wasn't the right time to show her the picture....
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109720
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Christmas Muzak was piped through to every store in the shopping mall. Giant red velvet bows adorned reproduction Victorian gaslights. Yards of glittered cotton pretended to be snow. A Santa rang a brass bell.
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10972121
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Each angry man leaps from a boy tempered by existential harm.
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109700
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Fat Patty sniffs the delicate waft of peat and sidles over, proffering a grope in exchange for a few wet-lipped swigs. Hell yes.
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109755
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“If your work is good you will get published. Just keep at it."
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109776
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"I'm in a wrestling movie!" you shouted.
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109700
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I play in the dirt with cattle bones
while Mother rattles the sky.
She tells me I have my fathers eyes.
The words come through bloody fissures in her lips.
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10971110
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Almost every weekend I'd ask Henry to go out with me and Marge, telling him we could double and, hey, maybe he could bring Ellen, who he dated a while back, who still asked about him. I'd suggest such things as going to a movie or out for a few drinks to reminisce about our…
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109721
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"More and more levels of physicality. And his eyes, man. His eyes were all wet, and... sparkly.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. And before I can stop the escalation, he's massaging my heart.”
“Get the f__k out..."
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109710
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A San Francisco cab driver named Jake, a friend of a friend, was my date for the party. I didn't really like him, but I needed someone to bring. In the 70s free love was the norm, but it was hard to have sex with a guy I wasn't really attracted to. …
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109741
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We'd been talking about the baby, about what we would do, when the women began fighting after the wedding held in the church next to our apartment. Their fierce and piercing arguments crawled up the walls to the second story window we sat next to. We'd looked outside…
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109722
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There is a roofer straddling part of our house, pushing shingles off of our roof with the edge of a shovel. …. I've thought seriously, at times, about becoming a nurse. Seeing your mother in a hospital bed, hooked up to a tube, more than one, too…
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109742
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Frank shouldered his backpack, grabbed the leather satchel packed with his brushes, palette knives, pens, and pencils, and exited the vaporetto at the Rialto Bridge.
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109721
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For the sake of convenience, we must assume that everything ugly is evil. Lightning rejuvenates. Sulfur preserves. The obvious solution is dismemberment. The ghost appears to Ludwig; “How can you destroy my creation?”
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10971211
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After my vasectomy, I got a T-shirt with a picture of an orange on it. It said "All Juice, No Seeds."
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109744
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I slide my CD toward Eric Burdon who sits, smiling and gracious and fatigued from Seattle traffic, at the table at Silver Platters, where I have just purchased ‘Til Your River Runs Dry, and stood in a line of old gray heads to have him sign it. I remove my hat and…
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109754
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when i was five or six/ we lived in an apartment/ and every sunday/ i'd lie on the carpet/ to watch squares of sunshine/ crawl across the rug/ while my mother inflicted upon us/ a centuries-long hour of television/ worse than any droning mass.
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