2295 5 4
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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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229454
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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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229451
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Your tongue is enlarging... wait, it’s growing hair. No, wait, it’s planarian flatworms, an earthy taste oozing down your throat. A terrible itching spreads from your solar plexus, under your skin everywhere. You know if you scratch even once, you won
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22931514
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Yet it was another thing to grow to become indispensable to someone without whose infirmities the helper could not exist. People in general had started to call that helpless requiring “codependency,” but to Althea that word did no good,
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22933218
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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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229362
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His hands fumble over my curves like he’s petting his golden retriever. He wears in inexperience on his face like I wear my mascara.
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229372
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I pass the Grief Benches on my way to work. No one is on them today. Last night I saw a couple there, him wet eyed and her with her head down. She scrunched her eyes tight as I passed and I remember thinking she was a fraud. It's alright if you don't want
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229200
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Like gymnastics, shoplifting is a discipline of youth.
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22911812
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Exhaling slowly and deeply, Tyler settled his back in against the saddle of the tree's broad trunk and let it all go.
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229084
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Tell me your hero and I'll tell you what's cooking with you...
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2290146
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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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228943
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The rapist was caught on December 23rd, the day before Christmas
Eve. Everyone in town was surprised to learn he had a wife and two children; a son and a daughter, the same age, and a yellow Labrador retriever.
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228775
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I think they've always been together, talking amongst themselves about whatever is happening around them. A part of me wishes they'd walk into the cave and disturb whatever is burning it from the inside out.
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22872413
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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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228656
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Driving home at midnight, on a night so dark, so wild. Headlights can't pierce the gateway to oblivion.
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2286146
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I wear a white dress.
I vomit on hers.
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22852717
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Oh what fun they had riding that bike! What adventures! They went everywhere, in town and out.
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22842118
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One day a woman, one of several translators at Ellis Island, asks him why he has changed a passenger’s name from Checzowicz to something else.
“The name was too long,” he says. “Ten letters.”
She replies, “But you didn’t change O’Shaughnessy, and it has
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228451
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She comes and goes,gingerly at times, or, caution tossed,a headlong rushof foam and froth.No matter, I am steadfast,keen to be immersed once morein her salty splendor.
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228486
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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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228400
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That I own one of the world's largest collections of occult references, including a clutch of rare and ancient grimoires, ought to suggest I'd have been prepared for the shock. But nothing in my studies left me meaningfully prepared. . .
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22841511
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He gathers our abusive fathers, our esophageal tears, our peanut fetuses.
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2284256
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He inhaled all these sensory impulses like they were so much illuminated, fluorescent pollen which jostled for space with the strong aroma of coffee in his nostrils.
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22841511
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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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2283187
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This is the only time she feels she can be herself.
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228392
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spreading gilded pages with a tlickt
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228242
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“We wouldn't mock the recent Tornado victims, right? Why mock the mentally ill?” Jennifer Donnell, Fictionaut Member. The mentally ill are close to my heart, having helped the most severely impaired adults and…
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228222
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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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228252
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228175
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When they were seven, he’d taken them out to the desert and let them shoot a .38 at rusted cans. The explosions rocked them back on their heels.
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