3985 10 5
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I hold a key to feel its pull, and follow where it leads. Once, because the moment, key, and direction felt so right, I ended up on the streets naked. A police officer threatened me with handcuffs. I laughed, mesmerized by the cuff's clink, their never-ending circles,…
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3983169
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The first punch sent me flying into a Christmas tree. The second put me on the floor on my hands and knees, blood dripping from my nose.
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397085
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I did not understand its meaning until college when I learned that Frost would take long walks—the inspiration for so many of his poems—and would leave his wife at home while he did. And just before he left, she would guilt-trip him just a little by walk
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3969106
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When I was young, my mother told me that J. Edgar Hoover was a homosexual. I don't remember exactly when or why she shared this tidbit with me. This was, after all, fifty years ago. But Mom wasn't a homophobe, so I'm guessing that what intrigued her about Hoover's…
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39678036
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When he tried to kiss her, she ran to the bathroom to throw up.
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39652014
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The ethnographer turns on a recorder. The story began before but that is lost, like it never happened.
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39602118
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On her lunch break, she dumps Luis for Daniel Towens, the ugliest man in the county.
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3954198
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Once upon a time, on March 8, 2011, to be exact, there was a flash fiction writer named Rinsewater who had a novel idea – flash fiction writers whose stories were published by indie lit magazines must be paid for their work!
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394643
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What’s it like, sex? I ask her.
You see that picture? she asks, nodding to the large canvas covered with a film of dust propped up against her bedroom wall. That picture’s the only thing she never sold. She hocked it a few times but always got the
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39451617
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We descended directly from Charlemagne
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394557
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(after Joan Didion) (after Charles Dickens)The car is guttering and at first I do not hear him clearly. The antenna is broken and the wipers are loud. he comes in better when I'm off the freeway. “We must forget about material things.” …
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393599
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I guess the ultimate, penultimate failure
would be to write a love poem that
turned on everybody but you.
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39282310
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As the sun rose each morning, so did the lonely old man with it; a sad limping figure strolling across the front lawn with a cigar tucked in his mouth, lighting fresh candles here and there, perhaps on an imagined grave of some loved one long lost to the infirmity of time…
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3924146
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Do not shake the baby. Shake the martini. That’s what martinis are for.
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39233222
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So, have your whiskey like a good son.
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390611
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i beat myself back into the littlon fish door, the algae sealing strip connecting as it does. Eons ago, i fell, and andy and i met with hands of crab and lobster in an eleborate room benaeth here, but I know very well, i am not him
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390421
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“My fellow Americans,” says his boss, leader of the free world. “The orbit of the moon has been disturbed. No longer revolving around the earth, the moon now hurtles toward the earth. Impact is expected within days.
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39015526
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This is what I do for a living: I unpack sentences.
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389312
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She stroked the piano softly with one hand and I shivered. Maybe it was the keys singing or the way her eyes were closed forcing her to feel her way to right spot or the sex in her voice. Maybe it was just in my head.
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38926253
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Our flag-draped coffins float to the surface of an uncharted sea and we appear together—patriots both—on the cover of Life Magazine.
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38713616
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We sat under the broken umbrella, its flowered fabric hanging limp on one side. The rain fell softly at the edges of our backs. I kissed his hand, the one without fingers (not a casualty of his job, only of birth). My lips pressed what I couldn't say into his…
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38694037
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It is late in the twentieth century and I'm on my hands and knees for you.
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38652510
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Class differences in New York (and if you believe F. Scott Fitzgerald, in America, generally) are best viewed from the beach.
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386200
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All of a sudden I felt a hand on my neck. I jumped up from my chair and turned to face my brother Darrell, with his surprisingly white shock of hair, the result of all the drugs he'd been experimenting with, back in his mid-twenties. He was even taller
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385900
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“Mortal,” it said, and its voice made the cobbler’s soul tremble. “Why do you disturb our peace? It is late, and you should be abed.”
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385832
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Also, our daughter had learned to splash, causing us each time to break into spontaneous renditions of “Splish Splash (I Was Taking a Bath),” which made us not mind so much that we were getting covered in water.
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3858195
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I sprawl, I spill and I splutter
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3857148
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My father failed in business in the 1950's when Dutch Elm Disease killed the elm trees in our Kansas town. He owned a fabric store on a brick street lined on both sides by elms, the doomed trees that transformed every Midwestern town into a magical kingdom and sidewalks and…
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385493
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The warrior would prepare for death by writing a death poem. Sometimes the samurai would begin the ritual and write his poem in blood.
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38532513
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Her addiction started with dry roasted nuts, and quickly jumped to peanuts. At her worst, she was consuming a large glass jar of peanuts daily. She loved while hating their salty taste and greasy feel, the repetition of tossing them into her mouth. …
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