2700 31 16
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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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26992313
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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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26993015
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For twenty-eight years, Cochran Baines removed a tooth from the mouth of every dead child that spent time on his table.
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269973
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Christmas is here and there's work to do.
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26981312
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The sign that informs tourists that there is
no access to the Hollywood Sign is the
most ignored sign in all of Los Angeles.
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26981611
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Their breath stank inside my lungs and tamped down the very minute amount of remorse I had left. It was replaced with contempt. Their fear warmed my cold sensibility as I steeled myself.
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2697114
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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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26952013
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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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269355
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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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26912620
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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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26914013
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I should have created a first-date questionnaire heartaches ago.
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2691299
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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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268952
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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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268811
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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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268766
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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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2684126
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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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268321
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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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2682135
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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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268211
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The lard-arsed ol’bastard struggling
soot-faced and yelling. . . .
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26815325
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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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268142
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The proud, burly tree / Rests on the now crashed TV / Thanks a lot, nature
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268070
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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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2679178
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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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267844
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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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26782914
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26772625
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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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26772319
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He and I are still and somber at the kitchen table. We’re both wearing black and stare at each other through blood-shot eyes. The children’s thumps echo on the ceiling above. I think about the other family’s children.
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26772817
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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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26742617
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...she lifts one shell, sips a little, then swallows the creature whole.
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2673116
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Children should not be made to do things unless they want it.
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