1384 11 8
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I heard a voice. It was calling me as from a far-off cloud. I listened, holding my breath, and heard it again, though fading away, barely audible. If I hadn't known my name I wouldn't have decrypted it. Three hazy syllables clearly detached with a sigh between each of them.…
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1384 2 2
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You are rounded just the way the mountain is, out the window. The sun sets on both of you now. Three of you, I should say: the mountain, and you, and little Frank, who is currently batting my ear because he doesn't want to be named Frank but it's for your dead father,…
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1384 2 1
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Roy Williams was his real name. It had been for the last 15 years. Since retiring from the Firm he’d lived innocuously in an apartment near the Old City walls of Dubrovnik doing the occasional quick job for them. You never entirely retired from the Firm.
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1384 3 1
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Flowing, Flown In the field stands a jealous man with fifteen eyes stored inside the cuffs of well-worn khaki pants. His pockets pull with clinking dimes…
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1384 7 3
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His audio archive of Bay Area musicians extends along two walls, twenty-five by fifteen feet, in drawers of C.D.s hundreds deep. Where will it go, I asked, permanently.
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1384 5 4
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On the beaches in the summer the fine hair rose up from under the material of your bikini and swirled around your deep navel, almost invisible to the naked eye, but not to the mind, which imagines everything funneling down into the center of your being,
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1384 0 0
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When Jimmy – and Frank and John and all the rest – joined up, it all seemed a big lark. Little Mary – she can’t have been more than about five years old – was dead proud her Dad was going off to fight the Germans. I doubt she really knew who the
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1384 6 3
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She was from Tennessee,
with advantages over me.
An upbringing surrounded by books
and sensitivity.
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1384 0 0
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The moon bulges with meticulous sick amber fire while first night’s chest heaves and sputters free infantine monstrosity from plague-wormed hovels, din mold choked grottos, and stale metal-cast labyrinth catacombs.
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1384 10 11
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1383 4 3
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1383 6 3
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If you shoot at them now, it'll be attempted murder or, worse, premeditated murder.
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1383 2 1
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I saw three kids the other day, two girls and a boy, crouched in conspiracy
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1383 3 2
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Moonless sky of stars, silently flickered by bats, with constellations defined and bold. The curve of the plough matching that of your shoulder, as if it were a decoration.
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1383 0 0
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You seemed to have that leisure to walk about sweetly when I was with you, honey-singing the reward for the intensity of emotion you lunged about in. Nothing seemed like it was going to hurt or harm anyone, even while I was going nuts between the legs.
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1383 5 5
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i’m trying to remember
don’t all the best apples happen
in September?
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1383 7 6
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When the teacher was out of the room Myron pretended to play with himself, saying, “down boy” and smiling to the nervous gasping and fake coughs from the other classmates and, since he's my close friend, I think he does silly stuff like this to contend with…
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1383 6 7
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Lights of human occupation burn/
in patterns like the growth/
of a bacillus, lethal and prodigious,
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1383 2 0
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“Sloshes to sloshes. Drip to drip,” I said, then ceremoniously flushed the toilet bowl, our heads bowed in reverence as Molly and I gave Swimmy its last rites. Swimmy, named by Molly whose overstatement of the obvious is endearing in a three-year-old, was…
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1383 2 2
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They can’t help
Seeing a child even there
In the crude brushstrokes.
They say it is me.
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1382 4 2
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No freebies. You want to read it, you have to read all of it.
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1382 9 5
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My relationship with Uzma exists on several levels, from basic to abstract, from animal magnetism to spiritual journey.
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1382 6 0
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That was some root beer float. It cost us a grand total of $275.
She pulls up in front of Fenton’s Ice Cream Parlor and leaves the motor running while I jump out and run into the parlor.
It was early evening. We HAD to have a root beer float. You
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1382 2 2
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thunder striking in a pancake cumulative, his building bouncing upon itself, life going Richtor Scale, a billion pounds of panic per square second
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1382 2 1
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Shut up.You shut up.That's disgusting.You should talk.Fuck off.Fuck me.whore.Yes.More.Shut up.
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1382 6 6
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There I was at the OPEN HOUSE. It was easy, three doors down. The sign on the lawn said, PRICE REDUCED. The real estate lady said, “Back again? Thinking of buying”? I laughed. There were several couples there. People have…
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1382 4 2
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The gated community of Dos was named for one of Babbage’s landmark educational figures, Ms. Dos.
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1382 8 8
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PATHOLOGY How awful it is to dissect a marriage! It lays naked on the therapist's steely table. He makes his first incision into the bloated stomach of our malnourished union. He polishes his glasses and peers, cuts the thin taut skin of our…
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1382 8 6
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I woke like an animal / breeding thoughts like flies
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1382 3 0
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The first indication I had of what I look like came when a man put me back on the rack, remarking that I was too pink. Over the weeks that followed, I gained a few more ideas about my appearance from the comments of people in the shop. My photographic side had been…
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