2375 4 1
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There’s an oak tree in Hanover, New Hampshire. Twenty years old, it is still a sapling. I imagine that one day the tree will have a commanding view of the Connecticut River and Norwich, Vermont, where my mom sat in bed, crying, watching everything unfol
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2374144
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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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237461
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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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237456
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We get prepped for the big finale, and we don't want the guy who turns up with the scythe to be Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy.
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237411
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Pushing his jeans down around his ankles, he knelt, and pressed his moist dipstick against my hole. “Do you always do this on a first date?” he said
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23741613
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The Bond Trader begins his morning with coffee and a hit of LSD.
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237352
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He stands. Shoes for dashing, and he could dash, if the audience would stand for it, through one of two exits, beneath one of three wreaths. This year, the year of the Millennium, the wreaths seem dark and Germanic. The stage seems like a Great Hall set for a solitary…
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237243
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I was nine when I saw my first dead body.
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237177
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The suspended heart became an oracle of sorts. Hung from a string, immersed in the kind of glass container in which tulips grow, it was located between Bath and Body Works and Kleinfelter's Jewelers at the north entrance of the mall. Someone had lost it,
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2371148
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hunting after dark,/
in the quiet they seemed to appear/ with every new poem I read, each new workshop, some hunting carried on/ by both animals.
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237175
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You worry that the mullahs suspect us, but that cannot be. We never touch in public. You weep and I shake when a neighbor knocks on the door.
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2370127
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She is unsure if it will work, despite all her reading of physics and flying carpets and propeller planes. The practicalities of aerodynamics in application remain to be tested.
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237020
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Robert was not in any sort of metaphysical or spiritual sense seeing himself, as in the scales falling from his eyes and seeing himself as he was. He was a long way from that kind of insight. He was literally seeing another himself.
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2370106
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It was fun, until he started winning every time.
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236953
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He blew out the candle. There was the tang of candle smoke, scattered by a sudden rush of wings, and the immediacy of another breathing thing in the dark. I heard the birdcage open, and the bird fluttering in there without crying out.
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236956
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The lizard is like wearing wings on my back, makes me fly like a dragon in my dreams, which I have all day long, while looking at you, talking to you, right now, having dreams in some part of my head. I'd like to stick out my tongue and lick the part of m
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236830
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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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236820
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1. People avoided Mac, the Great White Hunter, which was how he liked to think of himself, even though he was not white. Mac was cocoa colored and stalked his prey nearly nude. The city was his…
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23681516
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When Carlotta left me, I cried / into my soup. I shriveled into / harsh mathematics.
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2368189
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Jesus will walk on the water.
Judas will walk on a technicality.
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236721
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This stage of Junior’s young life was static, moving very little off-center since his graduation from high school five years ago. Treading water both professionally and emotionally never worried him. Not until after what transpired that night when Pr
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2367149
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I passed Buster Keaton on the way to work this morning. He was standing, hands in pockets, at the corner of Riverview and Keil. It was the young Buster, handsome and still strong enough to pin down the scars that marked his childhood. This was the Buster
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236786
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It was my grandmother's idea of a joke, but I never realized she was joking when she repeated it every Thanksgiving. She would sit at the head table just before Uncle Leon would carve the bird and ask, "It's an American holiday. Shouldn't we be roasting an eagle…
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236796
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I realized something must be terribly wrong.
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236701
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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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236793
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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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236785
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Sometimes you have to make sacrifices to get where you need to be.
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236695
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During fifth grade, I was called /
closeted queer and tall faggot.
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23642313
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23641913
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On the bed he tickled her until she was crying with laughter. And then the tickles became caresses, the fingers, lips.
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