2177 31 16
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Everyone is botching everything, even the rescue team. They can't get to me. I am surrounded by people who don't know a fatal wound when they see one. I am so determined to live that I become bossy.
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2177 20 12
|
...I pray for the animal souls I have taken -- panther, gazelle, hyena, vulture...
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2177 0 0
|
Her body shivered from the liquid and she felt loose. Her mind relaxed and a veil of pink mist covered her body.
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2176 3 3
|
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2176 41 12
|
Within seconds, I strip her free of all that she wears. Her toes are polished the color of plump pink tulips.
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2176 1 1
|
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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2176 4 3
|
I. When I was young, my best friend was only three inches high. He was chubby, always cheerful, and very funny. He didn't start out as anything much. I always imagined he came into being in a small factory, in China, at the mercy of two small, yellow hands and a …
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2175 20 15
|
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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2175 2 2
|
The girl I sat next to said she had just looked up in time to see it, Randy, and it was quick thinking that you avoided it. Randy said he nearly missed it and commented on how Judy was the only one in the world who could discover plastic bubble paste, bab
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2175 15 5
|
Quiet. You sit quiet as a mouse in the corner. Push a little doll around and hum la-la-la so they forget you’re there while they have the cocktail hour.
That’s how you find out they’re killing Grandma.
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2175 0 0
|
“Ah, there’s the Tasmanian tiger,” the visitor says in an American accent, maybe midwestern. “It’s called a ‘thyracine,’ right?”
“Thylacine, yes.”
“Un huh. Thylacine. Extinct now, isn’t it?”
“Oh! Let’s hope not
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2175 1 1
|
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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2174 15 9
|
The two girls who were my best friends had not minded that I didn't draw it in. It was Obie, as we called him for short, who commanded me to inhale at thirteen. "You're dead," Obie said, as soon as I did it. I fell backward in the tall, yellow grass.
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2174 2 3
|
I am remembering this day for all days. Remembering. All days. Always. This is the day you threw the TV out the upstairs window. I'm remembering. Always. This is the day that started with you shaking the toaster over me so all the crumbs fell out.…
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2173 9 9
|
Frisbee dog. Stealth the cat. Read more. Cut toenails. Less wine. Bind the ties. Avoid mirrors. Divide water.
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2172 3 3
|
'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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2172 5 3
|
Hey there little hippie girl, smilin’ to the ears and dripping with scarves,
I cherish our friendship.
However, every time you take off your shoes to dance at a rock show,
hair swingin’ like silk vines in the paradise that is your shaking ass...
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2171 15 7
|
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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2170 7 4
|
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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2170 1 0
|
Sure, we'll look at the causes for the lack of smackers, but, really, if you had a Swiss bank account stuffed with dinero, you wouldn't care how much your spouse's sex-change operation costs or if your boss approved of your lunch-hour massages you receive
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2169 14 11
|
Her husband wouldn’t let her call an exterminator. That doesn't work, he said. The real reason he said no was that he was cheap.
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2169 7 2
|
Sylvia Plath killed herself while her children slept upstairs, breakfast ready at their doors. Anne Sexton wanted to do it, but Sylvia got there first, making Anne just a little less remarkable, although she tried often enough, her death like a song put on repeat. …
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2169 0 1
|
Gordon He pressed the side of his face to the pillow and waited for the sound of birds. The room was black, the window open; when a breeze came the curtains billowed out against a lighter sky. He heard the clock. He heard the dry sound of Helen breathing;…
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2168 8 2
|
"Michael has had no drink, no cigarette, no illicit drug and very little illicit sex since September 14, 1989."
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2168 3 3
|
Eddie Dorsett was a dumb kid. Nobody could dispute it. More than that, Eddie Dorsett was a fat, slothful, whining, shilly-shallying, phlegmatic zero of a kid, the lowest of the third-graders for certain and a prime contender for the lowest of the entire R
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2168 21 15
|
In the dread / of night, navigate by the sliver moon
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2168 41 11
|
He drove down there in his truck the second time. Didn't want to get anywhere near that snooty car of hers.
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2168 21 8
|
Women with tremulous breasts. Going down the swimming pool drain.
|
2168 0 1
|
“Do you ever read writingand wish that it was about you?That you caused the epic fucking swell of emotions?That you were the only one capable of the rescue? Do you ever read writingand feel it so intensely?Like every word is an angry and desperate misfiring…
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2167 10 8
|
I drink with my thinking problem intact.
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