1950 3 4
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Out the window is an empty birdbath, dry flaky concrete ring, no birds.
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1950 13 7
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1950 1 0
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I am wearing stolen socks. Not because I haven't any of my own, and not because they are an exact fit. Only because they soothe my emptiness inside.
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1950 16 13
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I am a purveyor of leeches. All my
friends are purveyors of leeches.
We meet weekly to compare our wares.
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1949 3 3
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A joust. A tournament. A playing field. ¶ Hmm . . .
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1949 12 6
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We go in gently at first, skimming over the first few swells and dropping speed, but then we pitch hard, tail over. The windshield holds. I think of Lily. I think of the baby. And I see my life.
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1949 0 0
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Face it girls, you want to claw my eyes out, don’t you? Or whack me across my 36 DD’s with a golf club, am I right? Well don’t blame me if I’m young, gorgeous, full-breasted and obviously the cat’s meow.
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1949 14 8
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once she went to quenchthen she went to scrubnow she collects dead toadsgrinds them with cornmeal to feed her sowsonce she ploughed the land toiled with her face deep in dark soil her back burning in hot sunnow she works in the paper millmaking laminated labels for the…
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1949 9 6
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He was the kind of man that I would rather have declawed than date, and then leave him on a gurney, helpless and anaesthetized. Cliff Eames had made me feel that way since we were teenagers. He would never be helpless. …
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1949 13 14
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I don't know if we'll meet again in the sea of light. Circumstances aren't only up to human beings. After all maybe it's all drunk circumstance, but that doesn't answer the blinding question, it only poses some more. This is…
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1948 4 2
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Here’s the story as compiled from the scantest of clues: The writing on the back of a stall door in the restroom of a twenty-four hour restaurant under the Gowanus Expressway.
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1948 1 0
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For Hector it was animals. Rats, dogs, fish, and quite often horses – sometimes even lions. But for Achilles, it was always dead bodies.
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1948 13 11
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He had her pinned to the back seat, expressing his love. Do you love me? she whispered in his ear. Do you, do you, Jimmy Dale, do you love me? His only response…
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1948 5 3
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Once upon a time, my friend and I met a nanny pushing a baby carriage and reading an e-book. She wore a plaid dress, blue stockings and a white barrette. A set of wrinkles marred her tanned brow. Multitasking seemed too hard on her.
Inside the carriage
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1948 2 0
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I am alive, and I am hungry. Angry, I want more. I am not content with what you're offering me. Forty hours a week, two weeks vacation. A mortgage and car payments. Wife and kids, a dog in the suburbs. It's all incredibly unexciting, unsatisfying.
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1948 13 13
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Talking about a Friend Over a Cup or Two of Coffee “Their first fight was over school lunches. Free school lunches. She taught Kindergarten in a public special ed center for emotionally disturbed children. The…
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1948 9 7
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"... I knew Willie had gone— out the back door or out the side window. I knew he probably slipped over the fence behind my house into Lou C.’s backyard..."
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1948 8 2
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Jerry tries to be funny saying, I think Charlie Brown should kick Lucy in the head when she pulls the ball away; either that or they start making out. Ewww, but they're both eight years old, Sandra says biting her lip, tying off her smile. Jerry won't focus on her…
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1948 0 0
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I'm in awe of her frankness, how she takes my breath away, how I wish to rush off with her to a splendid hideaway where only the two of us touch the grape-stained mountains and the cerulean sea, wild blades of grass quivering with the breeze. Sometimes th
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1948 7 4
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Why can't you mimic your mythical counterpart? Anna Karenina? Have you never considered the tall dark stranger? The boot to the face, the fangs on the neck? Vronsky is Russian Gentry, a veritable prince and he swept that Anna off her feet in two sec
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1948 5 4
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The apartment was a second-level place, so I went down the steps and looked through the stained glass window of the door. “Ah hell,” I said to myself. Raymond Carver and John Fante and Charles Bukowski were outside. I opened the door.
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1947 12 5
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The right is empty, waiting to receive the load like a catcher behind home plate.
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1947 4 2
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I know I know how many times you want me to tell you I’m sorry, okay?
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1947 2 2
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His birthday buddy was like a wife to him: they were born a day apart.
This was coordinated, he believe, in the womb. Well, to be more accurate, wombs. She was due two weeks earlier but waited; he two weeks later but cut his womb-time (as the kids call i
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1947 16 15
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• Don’t confuse the virtues of bananas with the virtues of banana bread
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1947 12 6
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After the show they talked at the famous comedian, reaching the way they do, with their arms. Their arms are curved a good way, a better way than the older white planes of my own.
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1947 7 4
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When they called him down there to the morgue to identify the body, he drove behind the wheel of his truck like some steady maniac on a long haul. The Ford 150 cried out for new shocks, but that hardly mattered. Mud plastered side panels and…
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1947 20 12
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I drove to you in April / and you loved me all through Illinois
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1946 24 10
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One sunny morning, a big-bellied ball of yellow fur surveyed a yard full of prospective adopters and ran straight to one.
She’d been chosen.
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1946 0 0
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The stupid suit made me look like an angel, which I hated. I wasn't here to save anyone's soul, not that any of the native animal life HAD a soul. If I have a soul myself, it is most likely in need of salvation, and in no way should I be cast in the rol
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