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Dan leaned back on his haunches and smoked. He was a massive man, not the type to sit like that. But he did. He sat like that, smoking and he said: “I feel like this kid I went to school with. Everybody called him Squish-Squash.” We asked him…
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22393517
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She said this is our abode and it sounded like a warble and she made a sweeping gesture with her arm and the boy started to cry.
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223985
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It was beautiful and bright and it felt so real.
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223942
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The handler found Topsy as docile as a woman being fitted for a shoe. Each time he tapped his cane against her ankle, she lifted her foot and held the pose, allowing him to dip his sponge into a bucket and pull it wet across the thick ridges of her skin. It was…
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22382611
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...there is something quite delicious about the air between people strange to each other, something that makes my skin crackle alive with the possibility of touch...
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223854
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O’Malley imagined the blissful, narcotic innocence of Toby’s world where soft-shell crabs crawled into people’s mouths and hummed a happy tune as they were chewed and swallowed.
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22382213
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Pretty boy looks over at me and grins, got a smoke?
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22362413
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Later I take his hand, and I lead him up the stairs. I want to show him something, I say.
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223694
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When I was a boy, I always wondered if Dad were black. No one in our small town looked like Dad. He had the thick features of an Arab. If he let his hair grow, it piled up in messy loafs on his head. Of course, I never asked Dad about any of this. I wasn'
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223554
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It's July, which, if you work in a public library, means that the Summer Reading Club is in full swing. The SRC used to be just for kids, to motivate them to read when school wasn't in session. But in recent years many libraries have expanded the program to include…
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22341713
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We were to eat just meat and to become discombobulated over vegetables and bread and not to indulge in sex with strange men—men were all strange once you got used to their distance—were Lincoln logs, poles, boulders and scrub trees.
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22343418
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But I do not dig graves, only cradles...
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22341511
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The sky was an over-bleached sheet, stretched to the point of ripping. Everything worn but clean. He was saying he'd be happier if we lived in Canada. The sun seemed very close, like a star at the top of a Christmas tree. Maybe I could pull it down. Our baby had…
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2232146
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Sometimes she imagined the piles of Dr. Nishad's medical waste at the end of productive day at the hospital. Stacks and heaps of connective tissue, lung matter, gristle and bone, cancerous clumps of tongue and stomach and ropes of bad muscles like wrung,
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2230209
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When he turns around she has her top off and is climbing out of her skirt. "I don't like old men that much," she says. "We don't have to talk. No one will know."
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222986
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Because it was almost like love, love. Because the potential for that innocence beckoned me, and I became reckless in search of it. I exposed my heart.
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2228108
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Sand underfoot.It's raining I say …
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2228153
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They shared a lot through the years – a bus stop, acne, and first kiss stories. George was happy to be her confidant, good enough friends to help shoulder her burdens. But he wanted to push her curls back behind her ear and trace her soft cheek with his f
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22283218
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“Spare change?” he asked the couple heading into the cineplex. They glanced at his brother, saw something was wrong with him, then at him, noting his dirty and disheveled state. They passed without a word, not even a head-shake.
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22284321
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Zach lifts his glass. “Look at us! We eat like kings. Kings!”
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222800
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Like gymnastics, shoplifting is a discipline of youth.
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222742
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The first band I was ever in was called the Coming Cunts. Coming wasn’t spelled with a “u” because we thought the phrase would come off too transgressive.
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222775
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Montauk was the solution. He had no job, no money. He could stay for the winter at the summer place. It would be a lark. He had come home to Great Neck after losing the last job and they were making broad hints at him to move…
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222620
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I was going through Lenin's jewelry and his paintings with a team of experts. I got the idea that I was hired to verify his paintings, although I didn't know he painted.
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2225146
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I wear a white dress.
I vomit on hers.
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22242421
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She likes his smile and Cajun accent, his earring and dangerous ink.
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22242510
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"Well, I'd like to inquire about getting a muse. It says in your ad that you provide muses for people who are creatively challenged by their art form."
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222386
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Shakespeare was Shakespeare, after all, the greatest poet the language has ever boasted: why did Shakespeare’s contemporaries even bother with their paltry efforts?
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222330
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Imagine, if you will, the heartland of America–the Mississippi River Valley–as a woman sprawled out on a bed.
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22221610
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Tents staked in desert land, a muted building of parched earth, in a thirty year old city with a napalm birth, they wait among gravestones in the sand.
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