1360 3 1
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For years, Nina lived in an apartment with furniture that was silver or clear or metallic, she could see her reflection in every surface. She had an enormous television that took up one entire wall of the small living room. She and Anna and Desmond, Nina's downstairs …
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136085
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The only resolution I ever kept was when I said I wasn't going to create any more resolutions, and now I'm going to break that one.
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136055
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Obituaries aren’t as much fun
as they used to be.
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136055
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The television was playing reruns of Mr. Ed, but it was hard to hear because of the flock of birds in the palm tree. I’d sometimes imagined the birds coming through the window, a swarming of pink cotton mouths, mawing everything in sight.
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136011
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He licks his lips and mouths the air, salivating, unashamed of his propensity for the round, pink grapefruit, the almost egg-shaped oranges, the firm, juicy tangerines.
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136020
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The flowerpots across the street from Frank’s room at the Place d’Armes Hotel never appeared parched by the late August sun.
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136010
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136063
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I had this dream. We were living together, and we were in bed asleep when strange, enormous cats began crowding around our windows and meowing. They made awful scratching and scraping noises at the windows, trying to come in. But I couldn’t wake you up.
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136020
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How many years has he dreamed he would be home again?
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136010
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From my office window, I watch the trains roll in and out of the city. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of passengers staring out windows as the train slows, the ones who have another destination. I've been on those trains before, ones that took me far away from all that…
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136022
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It didn't matter if they burned or not.
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136022
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...She was my first, my only, she broke me in then brought me down. Alone now, I cycle through hundreds of variations of her image like a flip book narrating some abstract story. That’s all she is now to me, an incoherent melange of tints, saturations, an
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136063
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The Bearcat 101 was a police scanner popular with a certain type during in the 1970s. Daddy was that exact type. I found the Bearcat in his apartment after he passed. His illness was a common one, the process gradual, implacable. No red and blue…
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136021
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The Fat Man took a sip of whiskey, then replaced his glass on the table next to his fedora. …
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136061
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[Lights up on CLAUDE. He's holding a letter, standing.]CLAUDE: Dear sir, We regret to inform you That your (that place with cream walls and dog hair…
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136010
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Me leaving is not the confirmation of all your fears. It is not. It's because of them.
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135931
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After ten days in Jeddah, I start to miss the rain back home in Tennessee....
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135920
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"I need a male friend, and I think I've found one."
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1359159
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Dread and drudgery sour each day
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135965
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135922
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The son stood on the porch with his grip packed. "I'm off to mine me a fortune a gold, Daddy." "Boy, there's a fortune in gold right here," said the father, indicating the ripe wheat, glowing in early morning sun. The kid slumped. "Pop, you turn over a rock there,…
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135981
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If you had a choice, be a poet or not,
I’d suggest prose for the lines that you jot.
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135975
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Just a lot of honking and hissing.
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135911
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Opportunity, says Webster, is a, "favorable juncture of circumstances." In my Oxford book of quotations, there are seven famous lines about opportunity. Seven – that’s it! There are twenty-seven regarding failure. Seems it's been easier for the great
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135954
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I loved her when she first came calling in the sodden dawn of spring. She was a strange and dangerous flower. Together we drank up all the money. The days staggered away like drunks lurching down a flophouse hall.
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135961
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135921
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135933
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The beer on the shore is
Lapping at the foam of memory
And I can’t sit still
Until I take my pill
Karma Wash, Hog Wash and Swill
I went to the top of the heap
At the bottom of the Hill
I saw a bum’s sign that read:
“Will eat dog food for
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135900
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After all, if she could get through World War II with no more than a couple of letters and numbers on her arm, she could, sure as hell, get through this.
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135900
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By the time I was born, my parents were already sickened, blackened, blighted people.
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