2143 14 4
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One of the women is a brassy blond, and when she takes off her coat, I almost choke on a French fry.
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2143 9 5
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Moans and whispers woke me. I rubbed crust from my eyes and glanced at the G.I. Joe clock on my nightstand. 9:36. I pulled the covers back and stumbled out of my room. The living room light was on. Father Osborne's black suit coat was draped over the back of the couch. He…
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2142 11 9
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2142 9 3
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Midway through the fall semester, an unremarkable girl in Professor Woody's Advanced Fiction workshop dyed her hair an unnatural shade of dark, changed her name to Tasmina, and turned in a story filled with made-up words.
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2141 23 8
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2140 11 8
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I have a few medical issues.
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2140 18 9
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Jesus will walk on the water.
Judas will walk on a technicality.
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2140 15 10
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Life was small. It was tiny even, so tiny it was hard to see it sometimes. Life curled up to make itself even smaller, to fit into the kinds of holes that insects crawl into to get away from bigger insects. Life was sad. Life didn't want to be an insect.
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2140 10 6
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It was fun, until he started winning every time.
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2140 14 3
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He hunched low and forward on his bike, his 14-year old self, flying down the dusty back roads of this Great Midwestern Land, his head full of the smell of the algebraic girl he sat behind in math class just hours ago.
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2138 9 4
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I was a gangly 11 years old, a year before the Watergate hearings pre-empted the afternoon cartoons on television, when I discovered an uncle's girlie magazine during routine reconnaissance of my grandmother's hall closet.
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2137 8 7
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Walk alone at night, quietly. Pause for eye contact with raccoons and night cats, your drunk self, and lights in the graveyard. Don't apologize for it in the morning. Instead of the shame you feel for one time acting selfishly and chasing a future, say…
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2137 7 7
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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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2136 3 2
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Usually, you shop around carefully before condescending to see a new doctor, but this time you go to the first gynecologist who would have you, who has time available. Usually, you refuse to see a male doctor (you hate having male doctors!) but this time,
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2136 39 18
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Sometimes, under the gauze and yellow salves, I glimpse you...
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2136 7 0
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We both lost our appetites, her sense of taste destroyed by the tide of smoke sweeping across her tongue, wiping out her taste buds. Mine was limited to the four tastes the tongue alone could discern,
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2134 25 15
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Do you suppose you could make your female protagonist a salamander rather than a human?
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2134 12 7
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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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2134 1 1
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2134 24 16
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He would lean on his window sill in the evening and watch the whores. They wore gaudy clothes and too much makeup.
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2133 8 1
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Ted did not understand turn-of-the-century costume dramas, and because he didn’t understand them, he often referred to them as "chick flicks" or "English crap." Even when the principals were not British. Even when the principals were Winona Ryder.
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2132 5 3
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There are times when I run out of places to sleep. I thought my whole life that god gave up on me. The newspaper bin is where I go when I'm desperate. In the center of town there's a large bin for recycling newspapers behind…
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2132 5 3
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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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2132 7 5
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The base of the monastery before him, he let her go into a warm updraft and she cascaded out and up, never falling as she rode the tiger into her next.
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2132 6 1
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"My god," Toni said, bending over and tapping her head gently against the counter in fake anguish. "His ass in those jeans. Jesus. I should be young and lucky like you." Toni tapped her cigarette ash into the coin tray.
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2132 2 1
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Influenza Jones knew she was Moses. Reborn, of course, because the real Moses had been dead for longer than Influenza could remember. It didn’t matter that she was a woman and Moses was a man, she knew what her body say and her body say she be Moses. Sh
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2131 14 8
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Martín stood over the slow, labored panting as if it were a mystery he could not explain. The dog lay on the frayed pillow bed, a knot of fur and skin, in his father’s office. One eye, like an almond floating in milk, stared up at the boy.
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2131 3 0
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By my calculations, all hell is uncoiling. At the moment, this fact is not really obvious to anyone, but I'm confident that will change soon enough.
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2131 5 3
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So she leans over the patio table like that model in that magazine ad and then takes a sip of her blended coffee drink as if a director had said to pretend the straw is a penis. As if this director only just shouted, “And you're a dirty, dirty girl, and
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2131 1 2
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I asked the Eskimo if he'd ever seen a vagina before. “Because I can show you,” I whispered. Albert Huffman, a recent arrival to Hamden via Alaska, was not, in fact,…
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