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137300
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There were six people on the bridge, myself included, and we were making our way across when something exploded—it was more a rifle shot than explosion, actually—and it cut like a razor through the delicate fabric of the moment.
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137320
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My first year I hated how big and unruly the plants got.
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1373105
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I am studying the way/
dust bunnies emerge, grow/
and apparently reproduce.
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137332
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To conceive of them separated was unthinkable to every wet-eyed soul at the burial.
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137385
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We love our other animals
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137311
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Sometimes you wait by the mailbox and he doesn't come. It doesn't come, the letter, the talisman from another world you've been waiting for, and you give up. You finally open…
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137300
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A door slams. The vibrations rattle through the floor, up his legs and into his chest. He can hear the yells, and the tears that mar her voice. Rat-ta-tatRat-ta-tat A door slams. Eyes closed while images of a life he will never live flicker on…
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137366
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And pity us, this generation of sighing:
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137321
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“You think it’s a self-castrating suicide note or a self-righteous freedom speech?”
“Probably just the ramblings of a madman, pissed he lost a company baseball game.”
“Fuckin-A, Pete! Double-murder suicide for a baseball game? Ain’t nobody that craz
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137311
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Liz lies in bed next to a stranger. He is snoring softly, and she turns her head toward him, looking at his eyelids flutter as he enters REM sleep. He stirs and rolls over on his side away from her. As he does so, he pulls part of the comforter with him, exposing her…
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137311
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I planned and planned. I followed the veterinarians around and I took vials of panda tranquilizers when they were not looking, and it was often that they forgot to look. The earth kept shaking, they were hungry, and many did not know what had become of th
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137323
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As I was reading “Not Your Mother's Book on Home Improvement,” a new collection of light-hearted essays by (primarily) middle-aged female do-it-yourselfers, it became abundantly clear to me that, unlike the women who tell their stories here, I am not a…
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137341
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I gently honked my horn and gave her the kind of friendly neighbor wave that only friendly neighbors can give. She didn’t wave back. What the hell is her problem?
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137300
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There was a bird on the windowsill, a sparrow, its silhouette backlit by a view of Uptown. She remembered many sparrows during her forced trips to Mercy Hospital...That was all over now...
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137332
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She is not centered, but she finds her way.
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137312
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As a boy, he had little hope of ever becoming anything.
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137332
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Hope is the thing playing checkers
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137284
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137200
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destinies bring me to a damned desert
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137211
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"I'm just saying," the older man continues, "We oughta be ready in case she hits."
"We'll be fine," the woman says. "We've weathered every storm that's ever come through here just fine."
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137200
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There was a motley assortment of customers in the restaurant. Mostly casually dressed young men and women who looked like freelancers of some persuasion.
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137233
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Better move ‘cause I hear them comin’ up the other side.
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137221
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I tried to enlighten them. For my trouble, they tried to have me deprogrammed. I condemned their narrowness of mind; they pitied me my naiveté. I ridiculed their religious bourgeois complacency, but they really didn’t know what I was talking about.
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137274
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I remember going out to a restaurant with some guy and a friend of mine who brought her little boy along. And suddenly her boy said, “I want to hear the man talk.” Well, that stopped us. Smart kid, I thought. He was fed up hearing her women friends talk
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137222
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Fall came early that year. The edge in the air wasn't just the cold, raw wind cutting down the street — the unity and collective embrace briefly shared after September 11th had faded. The weight from…
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137242
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Every day from my window I saw John Brigham's dog making its way across my field. The dog picked carefully through the shorn corn stubble taking the same route, I'm guessing, it took when the stalks made a shaded rustling forest. There is a narrow path…
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137210
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She smiled at him. "You want to know the secret, that's why you want her to tell - not because you want her to be happy."
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13721714
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After Slick Daddy — aka Billy Ray Thompson — gave up driving his log truck and took up with playing and singing the blues full-time he was what you might call a hot property around the juke joints along Highway 61. The women didn't seem to mind…
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137264
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I try as much as I can to write but only in as much as you believe―am I successful.
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