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To his astonishment, he discovered Maggie curled up inside the Maytag dryer, head down, shoulders hunched over.
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22592315
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I blame it all on evil humors. Something's leaking.
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2259219
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"You come to nature with all your theories, and she knocks them out flat."--Renoir "Dreaming is free."--Blondie "I can't vouch for my ability to avoid dullness..the odd position in which poets find themselves explains their often-sentimental identification with the…
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22592413
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She was still alive when I started to write the story of her life, called Lucy's Story, about her recovery from catnip, but it was not the real story. In the fake story, she took the subway to A.A.
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225911
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Too late, I feel a bite under my left heel, but before I can look, I blunder into Robert and Paul rolling across the bedroom floor. They knock me over like a bowling pin, and I grab Robert’s hands and try to pull them from around his father’s neck.
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225854
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When she was eleven, Margaret still believed in mermaids. She would fasten the neon diving rings that her mother gave her to her ankles and swim around in the pool for hours. By the end of the afternoon, with chlorine-swollen skin she would wince as she…
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225800
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Why, I tell you, one run through that song, I’m always about to find my way out. But if this happens just two more times now, I tell you, I am going to go out and start something. You can’t treat a man like this. Even if he is smaller, like me. Why, I
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225851
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Silent Murf was largely toothless, and the gaze from his eyes diverged in opposing directions; his skinny arms were a fancywork of jailhouse tattoos and what appeared to be scabbed-over claw marks.
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22582015
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The tailfins of our ’57 Plymouth Fury dip and rock from the stress: Three boys—say no more?—jumping into the car. And Dad, loading suitcases into the trunk, working them around the steel cooler heavy with Cokes, root beers, ice. He slams the trunk lid dow
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225664
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225677
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Here's the '08 presidential campaign in a nutshell: The Dems couldn't dredge up a white guy that even the dead in Chicago would vote for, so they went with Obama. Meanwhile, the GOP couldn't dig Reagan up try as they might,…
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225540
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Why am I attracted to this girl?
She’s beautiful. Only five foot four, but still looks skyscraper tall thanks to those skinny greyhound legs of hers. She told me she used to dance, then giggled and said she hadn’t since she was five years old.
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225333
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'Tis a cruel season. I have nothing and no means to order anything. Nobody to shop for and nobody to buy things for me. But the catalogues keep coming. And these catalogues don't bring out the best in me. The catalogues switch on what I call my want switc
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225300
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I was born upside down, the umbilical cord looped twice around my neck. My mother claimed she was so busy working the swing shift at the hospital that she didn’t even know she was pregnant at first. But I found this hard to believe. Of course she knew. My
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225360
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The boy peered at the rather unusual place between the girl’s legs, which was entirely more complicated than a person might be given to believe should he see it, for example, bundled in underpants or a bathing suit.
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2252910
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When Matthew calls I'm sautéing garlic for the polenta and Joe is squeezing buttercream rosettes from a Ziploc bag onto a spice cake he made from scratch. Or trying to—we…
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225299
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Frisbee dog. Stealth the cat. Read more. Cut toenails. Less wine. Bind the ties. Avoid mirrors. Divide water.
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2251127
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I signed on with a large national restaurant chain to write descriptors for menus, and I was the very first to use the term "farm-fresh" to refer to eggs.
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225112
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The Army Corps of Engineers spent $92,000 in federal stimulus money on costumes for mascots such as Bobber the Water Safety Dog.
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225111
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We do not say to the fish, “How do you pronounce your name?” For its name is long and colorful, like the rainbow. We can pound the kalo plant into sweetened poi before it answers.
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225052
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"People do that. They cross the road when they aren’t supposed to and get away with it. They do it all the time. Only, then, he might think I was a rebel and I’d rather he imagine me a square. A square who never was a wild thing. A rebel who chose to be t
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225011
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The orange sky melts away.
Shadows fall and twist in the wind. I’m on patrol with three of my buds, there to retrieve the body of a fallen comrade, Bill’s body, we’re told. They got him, used him, then dumped his body in a ditch and said, “He
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2250157
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Now he took his guitar in hand, and at once he felt a strange fiery sensation rise from the soles of his feet, to the palms of his hands, to the tips of his fingers: the Duende. It was that mystical force poets can sense, and no philosopher can explain.
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225062
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A piece of her skull landed here. But it fell off. Then I couldn't find it.
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224920
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Fridays always said it was time for golf,which left me wide, wide like the space between your teeth,on the stoop til you'd let me share your palm with your nine iron.I was a utility. Your gap toothed divot tool or a headcover that had your smile.Sometimes you'd gawk back,…
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224877
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There it was, square in the middle of someone’s lawn: a slice of white bread, like a shirtless Englishman stretched out in the sun.
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224774
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I looked at her greying face and wrinkling hair and tried to fathom why my counsellor was suddenly being such a bitch.
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2247239
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"Bit of a shrinkage situation."
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224742
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China refuses them politely,
politely in that Communist way
of saying without saying.
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224677
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One of the pieces, I noticed, had the real shape of a miniature chicken, its mohawk, pin legs, and small definition of wing. “Look at that,” I said to my friend. And just then, the wing twitched.
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