2690 11 4
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A young woman in shorts removes her sunglasses, putting them on top of her head in order to study a little girl sitting on her father’s lap on the bus.
“I want to get me one of those,” she’s says, smiling. Dark eyes, her dark hair wet and hangin
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26903116
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I don’t remember the name of the boy in high school
or if I cried at his funeral
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26902313
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We met an old friend and his old dog. We went off leash on the lush Buffalo grass. He and I—this old friend, I mean—talked mostly of divorce, something we shared between us.
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269096
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Frank says if I eat the whole bowl of live crickets he’ll give me five dollars and his grandfather’s silver bullet from the war.
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268942
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This is my motorcycle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My motorcycle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my motorcycle
is useless. Without my motorcycle, I am useless.
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2686299
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TRAVELING NORTH Though you are dead now. Though I walk covered in dust through this strip mall in Iowa. I remember the collection of tendencies that led me here. The flat landscape. The blazing heat of cornfields. The landscape and body are one…
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26854013
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I should have created a first-date questionnaire heartaches ago.
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268455
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I made this robot. Everyone was making them. Mine was a vacuum cleaner with a rubber jack-o-lantern mask taped to the handle. His name was Z-Bot2131F, but I just called him Brady, after my dead brother. Brady, my brother, had come out cold, and…
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268352
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his wife had made love to another man,
out of spite or love or to wake him from
his conventional slumber, we never learned.
We were there as a foil,
a first step towards reconciliation,
unction.
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26812620
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There is a certain stage of sobriety among men who drink every night. In that stage, they are their best selves: they write novels, fix cars, care for their young. Then they change.
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26812013
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Her eyes grew wide, moist, catching the low light, holding onto it as if an imprisoned lover. "So you come home." I smiled. Was she playing a game?
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267966
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It drifted into the sea, I say, when you ask me about home. You’ve only known me for a few moments, so you’re not sure how to gauge me. You laugh, and make an Annabel Lee reference. The English teach in me wants to hug you. The New Jersey in me wants
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267972
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It's been so long since I've been in touch with any of you—if I ever was in touch with you—because my family and I took up residence in the local Wal•Mart.
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26765325
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The Trinity boys don’t blame me at all. They know I am not stupid about the world. I am a robust girl. Nevertheless, like everyone else I have limits. I am a clock that winds down.
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2674178
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“You don't know what it's like, to be an old man, to be alone man, behind blue eyes,” he said to the downtown city sidewalk. The sidewalk said nothing. People with someplace to go rushed by him, not stopping.
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267311
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The lard-arsed ol’bastard struggling
soot-faced and yelling. . . .
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267342
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The proud, burly tree / Rests on the now crashed TV / Thanks a lot, nature
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2672135
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I'm somewhere on I-10 in Mississippi, barreling westbound at 80 miles an hour through a rainstorm on a late Wednesday afternoon. The last road sign I remember was for Beauvoir, some Confederate general's…
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267211
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The neatly-gentrified Mtsensk District plaster buckled in all the right grey-painted places. The aged, yellowing windows rose and fell in fashionable decay. It was a well-upholstered citizen's slum, drawn to exacting state specifications. Local housing authorities…
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267221
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“Maybe she will like Boo-Ba-Loo, the large male from America,” they said. So they shipped in Boo-Ba-Loo and put him in the pen next to Ding-a-Ling.
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267170
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In the shower she sees that her nipples are large and brown, feels the weight of her breasts in the hot water, and suddenly her hand is between her legs, seeking the pleasure that's always been denied her, always
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26702914
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26692625
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There's no surcease from heat, no "cool of the evening," like the songs say about summer in the South. Those songwriters sat under fans in the Brill Building in downtown Manhattan.
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2669126
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Opposite the foothills, on the field's southern edge, was a stand of old eucalyptus trees, each one a gnarled sentry with bark like burnt skin peeling from its trunk.
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2667116
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Children should not be made to do things unless they want it.
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26672817
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If you outlive me, she said, it won't be because I smoke but because of what you put me through when you quit.
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2666138
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I stood there skinny-as-a-half in “big hair,” ankle boots, and black eyeliner. P. was in radio, not books. He had a sense of humor. I was researching a different man for a novel.
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266621
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He was the kind of cat who began lifting weights in the fourth grade.
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266544
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I hear all the static in her head, all the fuzzy threads from half a mile away. She hates dirt. She hates the couples who come in and talk stupid lies at each other. It's so simple with her. I ask what she likes. The feeling of soft wool on her bare nippl
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26632720
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I peeled his tongue, word by contemptuous word, until he had nothing left but a scrappy shred of muscle flapping in his empty head...
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