1566 13 7
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Don and I return to Rasheed's room on the top floor of the middle house where Uzma sits waiting to speak her piece. I'm feeling blessed listening to their enthusiastic chatter. It's like the world is opening up to me again, allowing me to experience a rush of…
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156621
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If there was a single constant in the boy’s life, it was that he had always thrown knives. In his youth he had thrown them only in his mind . . .
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156600
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Frank sat next to her on the gurney and squeezed her hand. "You're going to be okay, Astrid. You're going to wake and it's going to be over and you're going to be okay."
"You don't know that," she said.
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156612
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suddenly she blurts out: “You are vulgar.” There is actually no perfect translation to it. “Bastos ka.” She meant I was vulgar, but also disgusting, distasteful, offensive, rude, salacious, obnoxious…
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15661110
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156511
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of Jim Beam when I was maybe fifteen. Or anyway old enough to admire the lesson.
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156520
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The gentleman is discreet, but his eyes wander from his paper at intervals as we travel together from London to Manchester. We happen to be on the same train and he happens to be sitting opposite me. I happen to be a size 34C.
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156522
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Smoke from the oil lamp traced the wall. It gave Nana something to read.
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156534
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Ascent/Assent
Together the horizon/
Catechism of love
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156541
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You gather their faces in the palms of your hands and their purple eyes blink, blink, unseeing.
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156521
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Grady Quail wondered why God didn't just have another son
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156543
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the start of what you predicted
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156443
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156433
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And, you peasy-headed shrew, don’t you dare think I didn’t notice that it was you who stuck that fork into my neck in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot late Tuesday night . . .
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156465
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He stops smiling and only
says he loves me when prompted,
as if asking me to pass the salt
for his inner peace as it tastes too bland.
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156401
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I was driving by with a dampened eye
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156420
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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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156489
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a half-moon hung straight up and down
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156461
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You're on the good side of thirty, probably with a little girl or boy of your own sleeping at home, and here you are dragnetting at three in the morning. We're all broken, and the scars we trade are all that remains of our fragile, once complex lives.
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156400
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Being the baby in a family forces a focused outlook on life. Not necessarily profound, not even wry, but a perspective that pushes for two things - recognition, and to be in on whatever is going on.
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156487
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He disrobes; shoes, socks,
shirt, belt, pants. He smells of hard work.
The nude whisper of everything else.
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156453
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Benjamin stands beside his bed and unpacks his few things – wire cutters, knife, tape, line, two blocks of C-4, wallet, brush, and a small stuffed animal – a monkey.
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156355
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156373
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life is a lucky thing, bountiful among the
drugs and flowers
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156322
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People questioned my motives when I became a smokejumper again. They said I had a death wish, or that somehow by going into battle against the big Pacific Northwest forest fires, I was still trying to put out the flames of the burning car in which my sons Jake (age…
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156321
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156322
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We do the work of fixing people like him?
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156388
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I caught her a-feasting with her eyes and smilin' at that Jesus- haired Waffle House cook, Dennis Roy, again and I said, “Merlene, my tiny kitty-kat, they's no reason to carry no torch for him ‘cause he may not be with us very long ‘cause, if you notice, they's no…
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156352
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156364
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“What took you so long?” she asks. She seldom asks me that when we’re done, but today I feel ready to protract the glory, to tease out its rise and fall like the lingering chords of a Debussy pastorale.
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