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The Epidemic of Weariness

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“Life cannot continue at a breakneck pace, because it is breaking too many necks,” the Health Czar told the President.

Beautiful Plague

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Jacob Obrecht, you are beautiful. Everything inside your head and everything you’ve ever made is beautiful and singing.

Relationship S&M

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"Absolutely. I get better at it all the time." he confidently replies. He reminds me that it was all her idea. They were online friends when she suggested it. "She loves it." he tells me again, but I think of her sad eyes as she walked upstairs to tend to

Sugarfoot Pond

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i was jus countin' your heartbeats, Emmie and you know what? i think they's the same as mine!

Out of That Bed 1963

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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.

We Don't Need No Education

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“There’s an ill energy that emanates from your precise heart that I find attractive”

Carmen (from The New Yorker+ a Jimmy Breslin "afterword" from Newsday)

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Every trip her mother leaves it until then: Shouldn’t she look for an apartment in a better area; shouldn’t she try for a job with some future? “And, you know, someday you could get married, Carmen.”

Tainted Love

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...skinny love, skinned and thinned weak broth love...

Neighbors

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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

Being Old is No Place for Sissies

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My natural blonde hair is no longer sultry. Instead of a Dietrich look, I now assume a dead on impression of Bette Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" some mornings.

How We Send to Anderbo

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She's always sitting in a soft chair watching television with little stars dotting her elbows and lightning bolts on her wrists.

Love

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Her letter ends with her best words: No one will ever love you like I do. Beneath, she draws a heart, sad eyes, two jewel tears. Yours forever, Dawn. Hole by hole, not to wake her sister, she pulls the paper free, creases, folds again, then cuts…

Threesome

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Six kinds of crazy, he said. That told me everything. It told me enough.

1918, 1944, 1991, and now

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Disability is indivisibility—all of us could be its members—unlike its affirmative action forebears who remain underrepresented, even as the groups’ selected contestants prepare to retire early, a distributed group whose specialty is American anthropology

How to travel with your Demons (3)

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Watch her now as she tries to not smoke. Considers, reconsiders. Checks her nylon bag for her phone charger, and lights a cigarette anyway, which she immediately extinguishes in the kitchen sink.

Pieces

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I find my mother’s pink Pyrex mixing bowl at the antique store on Fairview Avenue. It’s in the hands of a fat woman in a blue down parka, and she’s holding it upside down, squinting at the sticker on the bottom.

Elephant in the City

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No beeping of horns, just complete silence. No panic, just calmness. There’s this one word: serendipity.

Veld fire

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The crackling inferno sweeps across the ground Devouring all in its scorching path

Something About Ireland (from FATHER MUST)

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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...

The Inkblot Test

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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…

Snapshots

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Jake remembers that Amy told him once that she thought that somehow he would always be a part of her life. That was before she went to Spain and married an American bull fighter.

Arcana Magi - c.22: Moving Forward

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Alysia never said a word as she rested her body on Suzaku’s feathers. She felt the wings cover her like a blanket. It brought memories of her mother doing the same as they watched a movie together on the couch.

Erase Her

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I wake up in the morning and write her name on the white paper napkin I always place in front of me at the kitchen table as I have my first cup of coffee. I write it throughout the day. Twelve or fifteen times. I've done this for exactly twenty-three days. I always…

Swicks Rule!

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She waves her hand around, says, “Pah!” and starts digging invisible things out of the potato salad with her bare hands.

Confess another sin

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Lisa

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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.

Forgetfulness

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But the urge now is to unknow the urgency with which I forgot my self-description.

The Strongman Used To Weep

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The Strongman used to weep alone in hissingle dusty tent at night, all of uscould hear him, sobbing, thinking about theone incredible time in his mostlymiserable life he accidentallybrushed his thick arm…

You Friend Me On Facebook

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You look just like your mom she says I LOL her and say, funny cuz you look just like yours

The Boy in the Sandwich (novel excerpt - children's)

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I was getting ready to eat a thick peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich when a blue spider pushed up a corner of the bread from the inside and said, "Don't chomp, don't chew! We're in here, we're having a good time, and we don't feel like being eaten.