1315 11 9
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131522
|
“Miss Brown had spent the morning (was it just this morning? Or another?) purchasing parsnips and leafy green vegetables from the local grocers, when she was overcome by a wave of nausea. The world went black and she awoke in a windowless, doorless room.
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131500
|
-That’s more like it. He released Ben and holstered his gun under his leather jacket.
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131564
|
It was an autumn day, late in the afternoon, a Tuesday, when the last murderer died. There was no official announcement. Indeed, she and her crime had been forgotten. Pancreatitis, her cause of death. Quite treatable, the cancer. Nothing could be done for the gene that…
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131511
|
Remain in repose, a little longer.
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131500
|
|
131530
|
On my second trip home from the University of Illinois down state in Urbana, it was during our break between semesters, I remember it was a particularly freezing cold and miserable January (1963.) I had a date with Lynda.
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131500
|
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131541
|
She found herself suddenly awake at five. She laid there in their bed while downstairs the coffee maker waited for her to press its button so it might gurgle and hiss, filling the pot with wakefulness. The dishwasher waited too, waited for her to throw its latch…
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131563
|
We have become//
the sum of our appetites,/
the growth curve of our dominion.
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131475
|
of anything if that's the way you feel your love must go down, off its last nut before the big victimizing crash of the end of days and flowers. But watch out for thosethorn bushes that grow from forgotten holes in the ground.…
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131454
|
She laughed as she stuck up the word flaccid,
it kept falling down
|
131401
|
It looks like Arizona, like a desert with secrets. The bed unfolded and she was being good today. She would be good, no matter how he moved and laughed she would be a lady. The names of the flowers escaped her, flowers she'd always known. All she saw were waterlilies.…
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131400
|
She told me it had been there since she was a kid, this large black spot like a blimp floating from her right arm up to the tip of her neck. She had really pale skin so she kinda looked like a cow strutting down the street.
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131431
|
"The food tastes kind of...off."
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131496
|
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131400
|
For as long as John could remember, he loved to blow up things. It started back in grade school with firecrackers and cherry bombs—he would put them in toys, tin cans, shit like that to see what would happen. Then he advanced to stronger stuff, M-80s. Skip and…
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131455
|
then something like a shark gnawing on a harpsichord. Her drum kit apparently is an entire laundromat. A pocketful of marbles spilling in rivulets, down a set of narrow linoleum steps, merrily as two warblers splashing in a birdbath. several octaves below
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131472
|
"The tundra was as cold and barren as Mother Theresa's womb."
|
131485
|
I was so high on the not knowing, I thought, you will love me for my confusion. And so I allowed myself to reach further inward than either of us felt comfortable. I imagined a delicious vanilla pudding at the core of my exploration, sweet and satisfying enough for me to…
|
131310
|
It was ridiculous. We were only in 3rd grade. How can anyone know at that age, only eight, that Judy F. was the girl he was meant to be with for the rest of their lives?
But that was how Stephen O. behaved. As if they both already knew this, and they
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1313108
|
Once with the lights flickering....
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131322
|
Can you remember now? How we could each disappear completely, connected despite fault lines. . . .
|
131321
|
Every spring, outside on the back deck, my mother and I have the same talk about how time flies, and she always waves her hand in the air as if swatting at a fly, but there's never anything there. She thinks the lilies will live all summer spread like a rainbow,…
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131310
|
“Living rooms,” said the town drunk, “are incapable of emanating.”
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131342
|
the silence of the hardwood floors
blisters into fragments
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131353
|
Small wonders, her worthless,priceless treasures fortify the wallswhile hoarded trinkets protect her like armor against memoriesof a desperate past.
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131300
|
I hear you calling me, as if through water spilled within a glass--
|
131340
|
We construct what we want, from what has failed in the past. We thought this worked. The picture was buzzing for me and I tried to hold on. I went blindly forward.
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131334
|
Words reach out of my mind for paradise. And come back with rocks.
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