2693 23 13
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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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26933015
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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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2692114
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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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269296
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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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26913116
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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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269142
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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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2688299
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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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26862620
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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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26864013
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I should have created a first-date questionnaire heartaches ago.
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268655
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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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268452
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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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26822013
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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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268066
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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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2680137
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It’s not every day that a girl like me gets greeted with a hairy beast that orgles and spits when excited. Didn’t help none that it only had one eye. Poor little ole bugger.
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26775325
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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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267611
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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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267511
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The lard-arsed ol’bastard struggling
soot-faced and yelling. . . .
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2675178
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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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267521
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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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267370
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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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2673135
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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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267342
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The proud, burly tree / Rests on the now crashed TV / Thanks a lot, nature
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2673126
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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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26722914
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26712625
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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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26712817
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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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26692617
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...she lifts one shell, sips a little, then swallows the creature whole.
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266921
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He was the kind of cat who began lifting weights in the fourth grade.
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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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2666138
|
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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