2160 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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21591611
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He runs a mail-order business from a storefront and distributes a catalog of disappeared things.
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215985
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On the table the image is by Chardin but the puzzle is by someone else and that is what he has dumped out of the box.
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215987
|
Megan beat up on herself later over the unsaid.
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215932
|
'Yer a cool, cool glass of water baby....'
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21581313
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He stays a couple of yards behind me as we slog uphill. I try to diffuse the tension with a coy toss of head, slip on wet leaves. My ankle rolls and I splat noisily down. From my new angle his beard looks less stylish—bristles straggle all up his neck. He maintains…
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2158128
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Two-way conversation with God.
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21582011
|
...he thought often of the rollicking waves, of being pulled under, of being weightless and senseless...
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215710
|
It's dawn. It's quiet on the pond in the Public Garden. The light is calm, the pollution is mild, and everything is still,except for the occasional cruising taxi. It's the beginning of spring-- tulips out, leaves…
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21573013
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I had felt suddenly lighter and next thing I knew I was watching Leonard Tucker and Sister William from somewhere near the ceiling. I saw myself, too, at my desk, holding my songbook out in front of me like everyone else.
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215784
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It calmed the guilt in my heart while kids reveled, laughed, and "made time" with the neighborhood girls on that final night of freedom.
No one would talk to those girls again.
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215711
|
It broke through the surface of the suburban world and shattered it into pieces, fragments of dreams and amazement. She was not the same as she had been a moment before. It was an epiphany she couldn't put her finger on.
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215796
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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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21561013
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pluck me from the charred grate
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215654
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Often we sit in silence and age. We are observers of dust, fashioning ourselves into antiques.
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215600
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Azure walked through the fog as though she were walking to class. Her hands swayed through the mist and felt the thickness of the cloud through her fingers
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215663
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For some, a vertical pattern will evoke prison bars, for others, product bar codes.
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21562016
|
Just bring me his head, that cerebral kiln of hot, ruddy verbiage and cadence.
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215663
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Doc and I talked for several hours. When I told him Mona was pregnant, he turned his head and looked at me. “Who's the father?” he asked. Don't know, I said. Mona didn't know, either.
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215682
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Later that night, he lay his shivering children in his own bed, the bed that betrayed and abandoned him just a few years ago. It will protect them now.
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215574
|
She began guiding Penny’s arms, whispering movements through her body. Memory and experience sang through every fiber of their being. The song had become her life.
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215595
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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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215511
|
“They picked me up in their spaceship about noon,” Austin Grantham says to me while pulling up an apple crate to use as a stool.
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215596
|
Okay, no freaking out. I mean, this isn't a suicide note. This is suicide fiction.
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21551310
|
I need a different storage solution
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215463
|
“Now God,” Mr. Smashface calls me out by name.
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215411
|
A 1960’s of walking sugar beet fields to remove the rogue bolters by hand and on other days painting the ironwork of cattle sheds with red oxide. Then a 1970’s when the self-inking explosion of tattoos on his hands and then his body began.
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2154199
|
I screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked him if he had shot down any Japanese airplanes. He grinned at me. “One,” he said.
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215450
|
once wedding cake
under pillows.
now fluffy frosting
on squashed defeat
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215331
|
I have never met Joe’s brother, of course.
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