1838 9 3
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Mesmerizing, the night’s queer colors, the darkness given depth by the earth’s crystalline sheen, by a sky choked with a million fleeting prisms. In the woods surrounding the house another branch snapped, a gunshot loud crack. The echo lingered, cap
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183861
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Puberty, for Ellen, was less than an overnight event—yes, she got her period in a more or less timely fashion, but what her doctor referred to coolly as secondary sexual characteristics—namely, boobs—took their damned sweet time in coming.
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183855
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He moved his rotten breath closer to my mouth, like he wanted to twirl his tongue around just to see how it felt.
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183844
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Rhonda looks guilty as it is, don’t you think? That hair! And the unhappiness smeared across her face like war paint after a war.
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183720
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Every day she loves me a little less, and justifies it by saying that there is less of me to love.
At some crucial, overlooked space in our life together, I used up my compassion and started to spend hers.
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183764
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In grief, I'd ride a slow train there with you, /
one hand in yours and one hand on the rail,
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183701
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I cannot remember what the celebration was for, but the baby was at its center. We passed him around, a sweet smiling boy about seven months old. The age when babies can sit but can't yet crawl and their thighs get plump.
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18371711
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She drew her hands out of the chest cavity and looked at the clock.
‘Time of death,’ she said.
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18371616
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There's a mirror in front of me and I thought it was so I could see myself, but I didn't want to see me.
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183700
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Sometimes I have really violent dreams where I smash Libby’s face in with a liquor bottle, a brick, a mounted boar’s head... really whatever my brain makes available to me. I always wake up satisfied.
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1837113
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The impression old Updike left on a young mind.
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18371510
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chet baker shades my eyes
rippling through the cool water
sometimes we feed the fish
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183722
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He had no leg to stand on and so what could he do but fall down, which is exactly what he did.
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18371411
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She'd liked the name of the tanker. The Amoco Cadiz.
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183674
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You cheat with a stripper--joke I told to your wife. I didn't know that she couldn't take a goof.
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183660
|
"I was just coming home from work listening to Consumer Dave," said Murrietta resident Mick Baylor, through his attorney, "when my eyelids started getting droopy. And he was just talking about how Circuit City was going out of business and I was. . .well,
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1836139
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He saw symmetry, exquisite geometry, body and built world in harmony.
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1835104
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3D is killing my porn career.
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1835116
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Down South now means August cold snap,
the forties roaring my wool cap
off my head.
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183571
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As I lean over the chrome rail and look at the floor on the street level of the mall, I ask myself a question. If I was to fall, I wonder if it would be better to land and lie there with my eyes open or closed. Closed, I decide, would make me look like I was at peace, open…
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1835104
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When we lived in the attic we were make-believe.
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183563
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No flinch, no stretch, no letting the cook get all golden about the chopping block.
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183511
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nothing has ever happened in this or that or any other or maybe too damn many parallel universes. . . .
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18351511
|
It came up heads so he is going first. He puts on a condom and gets in
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183544
|
Back arching, spine twisted, muscles tense and turning. I am putting off my work. Jane Eyre is in the back of my mind whispering about childhood patriarchy and I am still clinging to images from dreams before waking; my last lover's face scrunched and…
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183588
|
The moon begins to rise over L.A.
while the roaches try to crawl up
the sides of the mountains surrounding the L.A. Basin.
While fires rage in the forests of the night,
here comes the moon over the horizon,
big and haunted, pock-marked and coo
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18352211
|
He tried to call on his break but she didn’t answer. He imagined her on the floor, sobbing, like she’d been the other day. The grey rat would have chewed through a plug-in or some wires and started a fire. She would be ashes, a blackened corpse, reeki
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183474
|
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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183485
|
When I feel the sort of longing that sneaks up on me unawares, the sort held for the wrong kind of person that can make a woman clutch her heart in the night and sullies her blood with unwanted dreams in a thinking person's landscape, I hear, too, the deep…
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183452
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I got a chance to study story structure, character development, and writing of dialogue in an intense boot camp laced with orange jello and intravenous drugs.
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