2018 9 2
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It's not that you want to be silkworm all your life. That's what I'm telling my on-again-off-again girlfriend aboard the plane. Her name is Phoebe as in that song about a girl who lived in her own world within the shell of another. Phoebe, I'm saying, to bridge distances…
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201855
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The story will starve. It will crawl up your throat to get the cracker.
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20181410
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Just a little shop girl in for the summer. Working on a typewriter. Barely knowing where the keys were. That was her. She was terrible at it. He was in a suit. He looked short, and thin, but something about him was captivating. He was in his own way hands
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201885
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Your pajamas torture us.
When moist they uncomfortably cling. They have evil buttons, and they cause us to stumble on them in the dark.
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2018146
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The winter following their son's death, Mr. Kelly's wife became absorbed by the tracks that ran in back of their house. At any given hour in the night, he'd hear her in the next room, their son's old room where she now slept, shuffling through dresser drawers. He…
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201700
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I had a weird feeling I had just validated his behavior — provided another tile in the mosaic of his ego and self-esteem — by doing nothing more than entering this hall of mirrors, and reflecting.
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201721
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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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201721
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The dump smelled of the chaos of creation, of rusting metal and burned glass, chemicals and rancid rainwater, wet cardboard and rotting wood, paint slaking off clapboards and drums.
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201720
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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.
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201767
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In study hall Brandon sat like a little faggot so I said “Hey faggot.”“That's right, faggot. Don't look at me. I don't like faggots looking at me. I don't want their faggot eyes on me, faggot.”Bell rang and he walked like a faggot and held his books…
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2017128
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Cousin Rudy pulled up a cod /
out of season /
we were rigged for haddock, /
it was dressed for the weather
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2016187
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the heat and energy it takes
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20161714
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Unfinished, deeply flawed stories require the kind of handling you see in movies where a Virus That Will Doom Mankind is disposed of by scientists in hazmat suits.
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201632
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Six months ago, Gary hired a goateed designer to "defoliate" the office, trucking out all the ficus trees and spanish moss to make room for curved sheets of fiberglass and, as he called it, "negative space." Now, her voice echoes off the concrete floors.
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201521
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If the photographs made sounds, they would rumble like static from an impending thunderstorm, pressed between the pages of a yellowing dictionary. Compressed sound, searching for the proper words.
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20152318
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Five girls wobble into the train car. Their blistered feet protrude from the bedazzled straps of their sandals. Conductor: “Girls in the back with the open containers, you can't have those on the train.” A heavy-set girl in a belted yellow mini-dress…
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201500
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She did not know what it would feel like, how it would happen … but she knew it would be done. She knew that it would be magical, like nothing she could see or hear through the cornfields or around the markets.
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2015115
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You aren’t easy to explain, you Americans.
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201473
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Ancient erections loom aloft
ringed by decades
centuries for some
in gnarled scabs of pine.
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2014157
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A retired feminist literary agent named Jackie and her boyfriend, Jock, were on board. Jock was kind as one might expect of a man traveling with a feminist, and Jackie was happy yet stern. She mentored me one day over lunch.
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2014199
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that day is my barking up and leaves falling down story, but in their elephant slowness it seemed no more than the regular run of the sun slightly disappearing here, and then maybe reappearing there, like a lost color, way over the horizon, or the…
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20141614
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There are simply no more words around me quite full enough yet to sort of cancel outthese more than emptied ones. I'm sorry. There might be some forever fields left ofcrowded purple flowers if you look hard enough but no mountain's majestyto…
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201432
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Knowing this is too long for here I won't be crushed or enraged if no one has the time to read it. Also, it's not fiction.
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2013149
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for the rush of longing
and brush with flight
that is her imagination
will surely lift her above the traffic
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201381
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She is thinking about her baby, the one she loved for exactly one month before she lost her forever. Now, all the love for her baby is coiled in the pit of her stomach and it has fangs and venom, and it is leaking into her blood, her bones.
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20131913
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old men with crispy sunburnt ears
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2013117
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Your specific request that I never submit to you again; ever, is cause for puzzlement, yet strangely motivating.
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201300
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Pussy’s eyes narrowed, her dark, luxurious fur quivering on her back. “How can you say such a thing! It’s not true.”
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20123514
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We were destined by chemistry and plastic figurines to give it a go.
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201221
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The barista with the fake rainbow nails and amazing cleft. . . .
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