2063 10 8
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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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206360
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her: what are you worried about? me: the dog sitter.
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20632718
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. . . there is nothing so selfish as sleep.
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20631815
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Put sunscreen on your / bones.
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206286
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“Mules don’t like to dive, Esther.”
“I said maybe, Hugh. Maybe.”
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2062169
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206264
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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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206273
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Recently I think I became someone else.
When the alarm clock rings in the morning, it sounds sharper than usual; getting up, my feet don't seem to quite touch the floor; looking into my bathroom mirror, my face seems to be melting, sliding, my eyes dri
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206293
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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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2062198
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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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2061123
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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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206171
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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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206198
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My wife stood in the doorway and talked to the back of my head. “You really should talk to somebody about this,” she said.
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20611311
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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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2061117
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I've been avoidingyour beautiful fact for years in just the past few hours it seemslike it was the scariest plague on earth. Andit worries me becauseit's something so new that Idon't know what to dowith myself.Yes I wouldn't knowwhat to…
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206185
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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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20601110
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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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20602411
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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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206021
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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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20602315
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It's as if there are little men inside her head, wielding hammers.
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2060109
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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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205953
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Now, gazing into Greg’s expectant eyes, the only Chinese word Deepti could summon was kuei. Ghost. Before that summer, her mother flipped through the pages of Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir every day, as if she could glean magic from the touch of her finge
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2059198
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He stared at the mirror, his hair looked chewed up–severed by a miniature lawnmower.
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2059159
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Outside I see the daytime moon, and it is faint as a fingerprint. My cousins have up-turned the biggest rocks and removed all the Sow bugs. The land is damp and red, and the trees feel wet to the center.
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20591314
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Alone on the platform, I waited for a train.
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205831
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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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205830
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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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205893
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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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205820
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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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205854
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The oven door topples off of its hinges as she kicks and climbs out. She growls and quickly slaps out her still smoldering sweater shoulder. Taking a kitchen chair by the back, she swings it over her head and shatters the window. The chair breaks into splinters as she…
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