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[continued from part one...]After sweeps, my schoolwork started to slip. I had trouble paying attention in class, and my workbooks and tests came back from the teacher marked in ketchup red ink. I had always been a good student, and this academic…
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21501313
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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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215096
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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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21491013
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pluck me from the charred grate
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21492015
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over tea & saltineshe read melike an obituary
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21491710
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When I squint at her from across the table I can see the waveforms created by her carrier signal.
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214963
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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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214988
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I know now, how she moves without verbs
after you crushed her into the river.
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2149128
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Two-way conversation with God.
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214982
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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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214858
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Mama hung them everywhere. It started with just a few, in our apartment and outside on the brick. She made walls into windows.
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2148128
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She was a beautiful woman. I don't argue with that. I welcome it.
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2148157
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the boredom inherent in living in the suburbs
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21471611
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He runs a mail-order business from a storefront and distributes a catalog of disappeared things.
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214785
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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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214711
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“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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214796
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Okay, no freaking out. I mean, this isn't a suicide note. This is suicide fiction.
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214711
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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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214711
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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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214610
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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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21463013
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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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214654
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Often we sit in silence and age. We are observers of dust, fashioning ourselves into antiques.
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214595
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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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214500
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At night, on these New England roads, there is no light, no pink sodium-vapor glow, no guideposts.
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214566
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I hope you'll have the time to read this before your attention wanders.
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214431
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I have never met Joe’s brother, of course.
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214462
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It’ll die in there and the stairwell’ll stink for weeks, Greg says in the car. We’re quiet, considering that.
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21442016
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Just bring me his head, that cerebral kiln of hot, ruddy verbiage and cadence.
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2144199
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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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Veiled by tenuous clouds and dirty air,
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