2121 9 7
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Every night famous authors read not only to us, but to a duck. A wild female who emerged from the lake just as we were gathering, settled her gray-brown feathers down not three feet from the podium, tucked her head inside her wing, and remained there. If the duck liked…
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212195
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Cornelia stared in the mirror wishing them away. She'd locked herself in the bathroom for several hours now, but no one had even noticed. Her surprise at cutting her hand while washing her hair was nothing compared to horror she felt when she realized exactly what she'd cut…
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212044
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“I changed religions for that baby.”
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211952
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She sees the little girls in the yard through her front window. They’re as naked as the day they were born, not far from the event itself. They dip backward and forward like pitchers, laughing, balling up their little white fists and shaking them like t
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211943
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That’s the way it went all day with me—didn’t get far, didn’t see much, just, with Mary, drank tea here and there. A fine day it was, too; not cloudy, not raining...
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21191511
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During war, as in any terrible time of upheaval, burials are merely quick words and a scattering of dirt, if the dead are lucky.
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211710
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With such an attitude, it is remarkable that Jerome Quinth would be the one to make first contact with the beings from Lepton Six. As near as authorities could piece together from the charred remains, the historic event happened innocently enough on on
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211732
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The house was empty now - silent. Each room was filled with air too thin to sustain memory. She stood, absorbing the emptiness, addding it to her own. Her footsteps were hesitant, reluctant to disturb the silence. She walked into her old bedroom - so…
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211700
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“Regard this inkblot,” the Psych says to Worker 168. “What do you see?” Worker 168, a thin young women wearing overalls, peers at the inkblot. “I see a beautiful summer day,” she says. “A young woman, wearing a flowing dress, sits…
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211741
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She didn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no. She didn’t say anything. So I helped her to the car and we didn’t talk along the way.
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211772
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Frank must have said "don't touch" about a million times over the course of the day
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21161414
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21161511
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211620
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. . . not if I have anything to do with it.
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211632
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The first door on the right is the bedroom. Even if I try to forget; my body remembers and the strength of its yearning fairly pulls me inside. I noticed you left the door ajar. Really you should be more careful.
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211520
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Berto had come to live with me a month earlier. He’d been cursed by being the favored child of our parents. Their indulgence resulted in a 40 year old man and heroin addict from age 17 and all that accompanies such an existence such as thievery, larcen
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211521
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In the blue of the yard the twins boil and scrape,
twisting about beneath the sycamore tree.
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2115124
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Shadows skipped across the bedroom wall at 80 km/hour. It wouldn't be so bad if people wouldn't use their high beams but it's the price you pay for living on a dark highway with low property taxes. “How do you sleep in here?”…
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2114125
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by Bobbie Ann Mason and Meg Pokrass
at The Nervous Breakdown website:
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/mpokrass/2012/10/tweeting-war-and-peace-with-bobbie-ann-mason/
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211461
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I am coming to understand how many memories of my father involve him, driving
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211300
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But the urge now is to unknow the urgency with which I forgot my self-description.
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2113105
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I do not yet really understand the power I seem to have at this moment. And I am certainly too young to recognize that it will end up being weakness, too.
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2113235
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But it was a necessary evil and one he’d made peace with, easy to do when he arrived home each day to the comforting touch of his wife, his home.
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21131913
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old men with crispy sunburnt ears
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211266
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The light, oblique and waning, filters through butcher’s paper to reveal a body suspended in death but never decomposing.
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21121310
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With the whole bizarre crowd surrounding us like birds on shit covered cliffs, offering up a bowl full of choppy seas to the many bored and stuffed sky gods, we danced our way into all their hard shell covered hearts as one thing. Still they never knew our hiding …
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211223
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My father's hands were huge. His left knuckles gashed as a kid when he rode his bike too close to a moving train. When his fingers fisted around a glass, the scarred joints bulged from his grip like blind eyes.
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21123316
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It was a year of red, white, and blue bell bottoms, chokers, and mini-skirts. It was not a decade of pink stretch pants, pink sweatshirts, and pink snowsuits.
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211284
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"I am in frequent contact with you know who, and am able, most of the time, to surreptitiously send messages all day long every day, whenever I am inspired."
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