2714 13 8
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The clickity-click of poker chips spills out to the six of us waiting for a table. We're old college buddies, drunk since one this afternoon, sporting the ball caps our wives never let us wear. We brag. About our poker wins, how easy it is to read each other, how we can…
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27134817
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Every one of them will tell you I drank so much malt liquor I could barf up a distillery and that wouldn’t be a lie.
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27112313
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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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27113015
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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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271173
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Christmas is here and there's work to do.
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271111
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“I killed a man.”
“Whaaattt???” I'd been meditating on the sun. I figured he was trying to jolt me awake.
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2710114
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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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27102013
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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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27101611
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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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270911
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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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27042620
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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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270455
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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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2701135
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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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27014013
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I should have created a first-date questionnaire heartaches ago.
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2701299
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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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2701126
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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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269952
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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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269766
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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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269644
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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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269621
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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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2694138
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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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26922625
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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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269270
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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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269111
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The lard-arsed ol’bastard struggling
soot-faced and yelling. . . .
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269142
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The proud, burly tree / Rests on the now crashed TV / Thanks a lot, nature
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26902319
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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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26905325
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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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26892914
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26872817
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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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26853423
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I wrote a fucking poem about you
And you’ll like it
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