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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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221752
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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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22171413
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When I was a little boy, I had a thing about women’s behinds.
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22173022
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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…
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221723
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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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22172719
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“There’s an ill energy that emanates
from your precise heart that I find attractive”
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221731
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The crackling inferno sweeps across the ground
Devouring all in its scorching path
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2217810
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I find driftwood, long, smooth logs washed up on the beach, drag them to dunes still wet from the sea...
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221570
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There we sat, myself and I, at a small folding table in the middle of the lab beside the main, l-shaped workbench. The lab was empty - always was - except for the two of us.
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22151210
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SeesWe fell into this lake together and traced the clean soft lines straight back to ourselves, with a carefree laugh, ha ha ha-- an embarrassing ease. This small miracle does tend to put in orbit something high flying besides clouds into the sky inside of…
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221543
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The abandoned body got up and left the room. It was just in time to greet his wife and daughter, who were just coming in the front door.
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221563
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“Life cannot continue at a breakneck pace, because it is breaking too many necks,” the Health Czar told the President.
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221471
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Jacob Obrecht, you are beautiful. Everything inside your head and everything you’ve ever made is beautiful and singing.
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22141510
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...skinny love, skinned and thinned weak broth love...
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221496
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Six kinds of crazy, he said. That told me everything. It told me enough.
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221310
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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.
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2213189
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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.
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2213146
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No beeping of horns, just complete silence. No panic, just calmness. There’s this one word: serendipity.
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221264
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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.
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221200
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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…
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221266
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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.
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2212126
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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
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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.
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221000
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But the urge now is to unknow the urgency with which I forgot my self-description.
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221000
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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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221042
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It scraped at Paul’s brain like a cat’s claw at the door. He hadn’t heard the song in years. Was that the Searchers? The Seekers?
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220977
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Hold your breathThe smoke here is thick, I knowIce underfoot, let it burn, let it go, but don't ask me to take your handYou have never been so patient as to sit and waiteven for the sun to riseWatch, now, here it comescresting over the hill as one large eyeboiling the…
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2209169
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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…
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220995
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We'd both done well to avoid crying before today and I couldn't stand to see him like this. I crawled on my hands and knees to the closet. “David, come out of there. I…I don't like this any more than you do. But you can't come to college with me.
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