1889 9 5
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I found my black dot nucleus. School got me in the 10th year with the numbers spilling outta my head, but now I got the cell on my mind. Everybody's floating around this joint all pink and green college clean, yellow face Japanese, or the jet-headed Greeks with their…
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1889 23 20
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There's always a sound, something triggering the fear.
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1889 5 4
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The tall, standing woman with bright red lipstick, elegant at one time, you could tell, responding, “She has dementia,” pointing at her brain. “She was a Holocaust survivor.”
And the one they’re talking about turns as she’s pushing her wal
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1889 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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1889 7 3
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Forget Ulysses, life itself is a stream of consciousness if you ever have time to get out of the stream and take a look at it. And there’s nothing that gets you out of the stream like a short sharp shock.
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1889 20 9
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My mother’s old china no longer reflects. It’s value is now estimated as drywall.
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1889 5 2
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John Lipkin took a drag off his cigarette and rummaged through his desk drawer looking for pot. There wasn't any. He remembered looking last night, but he looked again now. There wasn't a damn thing, just some stems…
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1888 6 3
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At night, instead of sleep, there were new and secret pleasures. Half-awake lessons in dexterity, in the limber material of human life.
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1888 14 9
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It's eerie. There are no birds. My friend and I take our morning walk in a bubble of silence.
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1888 10 7
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People do want to be kind. It's just that sometimes they need a little push (or, in a few cases, a big fat shove) in the right direction.
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1888 2 1
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After he’d told her on Friday that No, he wasn’t going to sign that contract for the cemetery plots she’d picked out—“I don’t want to spend my whole life knowing exactly where I’ll end up” is exactly what he’d said—the marriage, as far as she was concerne
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1888 9 6
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All of those lovelies, pitched on the ground, ignored and ready to rot.
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1887 5 2
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On some evenings, when I would sneak out of my room, I'd sit on the verandah and count the streetlights. I'd count the stars in the sky and trace the moon with the tip of my finger and consider how anyone could make it through the night when there were so
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1887 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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1887 4 1
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1887 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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1886 19 8
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You would think when a bowl hits a tree the sound would be fierce, a loud clatter as stoneware explodes on birch bark dispersing shards in daffodils and grape muscari, but the noise is gentle, a thudding clink like empty bourbon bottles rattling hollow in…
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1886 12 3
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I read the ending to her and it was clear to her--clear as it could only be to a woman, to a woman you're in love with--that I had been describing her.
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1886 6 3
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Oh, also, had no idea what the whole visit to the Kingdom of the Dead was getting at. Interesting, but seems unrelated to the larger story. I'd cut it. Remember — this is a story about one man's attempt to get home. Stay focused on that.
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1886 15 10
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You wanted a love poem written just for you. / Here it is. Don’t look askance.
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1886 2 1
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One sunny day after Christmas Eldon went ice fishing with Grandma and Grandpa at Haymarsh. He was not fishing for Ice Fish but for regular fish who swam under the ice. Craig was there too. Craig was wearing more pairs of socks than anyone. He was wearing 3…
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1886 26 20
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People go through life all the time with only one kidney, or with some of their female-parts removed.
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1886 0 0
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No matter the guidance and support she received from her parents, her psychiatrist, and her friend; no matter how hard they tried to remind her of her humanity, Azure believes this chimera form is her true body now.
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1885 16 17
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what smells like love may not be love at all
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1884 4 2
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Dale of the threadbare corduroy blazer and the same two plaid button-down shirts, of the unkempt beard and short-shorn hair and holed ears, the plugs overloose and then lost so that the effect was not a toughening edginess, but deformity, the same self-in
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1884 0 0
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1883 5 4
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I am a sunflower. I turn my yellow and black face, bruised, to the sun, hoping its light will heal me. With my eyes closed I can see my stamen, veins in my eyelids, bulbous where they intersect. The sun feeds…
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1883 9 8
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Turns out it was you. But. You made it into the latest dumping ground in spite of their voted insults. In spite of being told you weren't even going to be around to be danced with. The loneliest girl now looks perfectly trim and trendy to all eyes.…
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1883 10 5
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"She has a lot of time to think these days. What else is a woman to do with the rest of her life?"
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1883 4 3
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I wriggled in the bed and felt the sheets soaked with perspiration. My arms were lined with tape and tubing, needles pressed in veins. I reached for the cloth again and again, and every time they stopped me. The hands that came were cold and hard, urgent
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