2054 4 4
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Alma Tucker settled into middle age with the comfort that escapes most women. Her festival queen days gone. Along with her wispy waist and cherry blond hair, replaced by broader curves and graying tresses. She was content with the way age had changed her
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205471
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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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20541311
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Know what you’ll become? You’ll become one of those guys who masturbates in any single occupancy restroom that locks.
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20541815
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Put sunscreen on your / bones.
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20531110
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When you were nine your head fell off in the playground. Dr Mort was called. He pasted it back on with PVA glue. You'd never know now.——When you were nine your arms turned into trees. Dr Mort worked his magic with the chainsaw. You still need light pruning once…
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205393
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The headlines were my source of information and contact. Four Soldiers Killed in Baghdad read one. Seven Ambushed in Fallujah. I’d read them, look for his name, and maybe clip it out. It put me there; put me in touch with him.
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205321
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I saw a former lover today, by complete accident.
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205274
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You want to read, you know where to click.
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20521410
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They were carried out / over shoulders of running soldiers / naked bodies pass
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205231
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“Can't you tell when I get lonely?”, she asks. “No”, I say. It gets awkward because she wants me to know when she gets lonely. I don't give her the attention she wants without realizing it. She moves away and stares at me for…
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20521510
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You wanted a love poem written just for you. / Here it is. Don’t look askance.
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205221
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She used to think of him as someone to entertain with charming lies, but things evolve in unexpected ways.
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205231
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You never knew How to express What you didn't know You felt With your words You picked on You taunted You destroyed Did it help To feel yourself Did it work To disparage Those who were Innocent and young Blameless For living …
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20522315
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It's as if there are little men inside her head, wielding hammers.
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2052198
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He stared at the mirror, his hair looked chewed up–severed by a miniature lawnmower.
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2052198
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YKK is a zipper manufacturer whose initials stand for Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha. A boy told me (and I believed as a child) that YKK was my name in code.
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20511413
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2051123
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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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205130
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After surviving the first night in the hospital, I was put into a shared room to save on expenses, and to make room for the deluge of new cases that were coming in, and that was when I made friends with my roommate, Tommy. He was a boy about the sam
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2051108
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A dark girl, quite poor, maybe three, maybe four, leaned on a statue of a horse and his man. (The rider rode him in place, but as if in a race.) Her dress needed patching, her heart needed smoothing. She'd tried to sell…
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205185
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We might as well be honest: we’re talking about the two of us here.
No one, not even the cameraman, had any idea even after all these years. For more than a decade we’d been bringing the six o’clock news into a medium-almost-major market region.
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205085
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As long as he could still take the stairs, he would go down there to be with the memories that each piece held. He knew that their time was about up, because his was too. His wife had already gone, and even before that she had long stopped using the washe
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20502411
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whistling some blithering tune, trotting around the kitchen in his underwear with his ribs, a long row of meatless tragedies that screamed for something other than the meal he was making.
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205022
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I saw life and beauty choking
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2050189
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2050167
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He wears an old black tux, shiny at the elbows, and his gray hair has been styled and sprayed into a fragile tornado. On his lap sits a Chihuahua wearing a bridal outfit—veil and all.
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2050109
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The winner was some kid from Ohio or Oklahoma -- one of those states that begins with an "O" and ends with a yawn.
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20491211
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Save the whales. Save the dolphins. Save the bored housewives. Save my hands, so often cupped over the sorrow in being alive. Save the beautiful made-up cherries of delight I feel everywhere in your presence. Save the sprawling…
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204953
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‘So what exactly did you decide?'It was two years later that Sato-san put the question to me. The two of us had been hiding for two bloody years, moving about in the marshes along the river, living off small, skimpy meals. We couldn't turn back to our unit, because Cesaru…
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204920
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when women’s hair shrinks into tight curly balls and sits on top of their heads like scrunches of wool, blowing in the wind, hanging from the mouths of recently shot deer.
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