1573 5 4
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When she was eleven, Margaret still believed in mermaids. She would fasten the neon diving rings that her mother gave her to her ankles and swim around in the pool for hours. By the end of the afternoon, with chlorine-swollen skin she would wince as she…
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15731917
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Jake remembers that Amy told him once that she thought that somehow he would always be a part of her life. That was before she went to Spain and married an American bull fighter.
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157332
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Grand Dad was born in the time where men of honor were never too far when danger arose, like the phlegm and fevers of an oncoming plague.The oversized house felt stagnate and angry as he closed the heavy solid wooden front door behind him. There was an echo that made…
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15722118
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One day a woman, one of several translators at Ellis Island, asks him why he has changed a passenger’s name from Checzowicz to something else.
“The name was too long,” he says. “Ten letters.”
She replies, “But you didn’t change O’Shaughnessy, and it has
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1572109
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I ordered biscuits and gravy
at the Sunset Grill,
Just before the Amber Alert
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157221
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Beard of Bees
My father always used to say to me, he said "Son" (he called me son) "Son. Falling in love is easy. Getting into the Guinness Book of World Records is hard".
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15722117
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After breakfast, he dresses and heads / for the blackjack tables.
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15722419
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Now when she speaks to him, he no longer responds with an interrogative but rather a cheery, "You're absolutely right, dear" or "I'll get right on it," or "What a great idea!"
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157211
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Pushing his jeans down around his ankles, he knelt, and pressed his moist dipstick against my hole. “Do you always do this on a first date?” he said
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157210
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The screams snapped Akane out of her thoughts. She looked up and there was a dragon, all alone. It flapped its bat like wings, stationary in the sky.
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157285
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They have a saying in Russia: Live in Voronezh, work in Samara, die in Tyumen. In honour of Saint Rose, born on the banks of the Voronezh, fed the hungry and the poor of Samara, torn apart by wolves in Tyumen on the exact date that she had herself predict
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157210
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Sure, we'll look at the causes for the lack of smackers, but, really, if you had a Swiss bank account stuffed with dinero, you wouldn't care how much your spouse's sex-change operation costs or if your boss approved of your lunch-hour massages you receive
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157251
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The gun sits quietly in the woman's handbag.
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157122
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1571118
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The wind has no voice
and yet we listen,
perhaps imagining the ramblings
of a mad man
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157176
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There’s not enough cigarette cloud to conceal her, malnourished and pale beneath blue and pink lights that summon 80s-era skate rinks. She saunters towards the center of the stage, asking her bored expression to convey detachment, while a DJ that fits the
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157156
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Driving home at midnight, on a night so dark, so wild. Headlights can't pierce the gateway to oblivion.
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1571168
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This latest married man who lives at a great distance has leeched her energy in that very particular way such men do. Next to him, I am as interesting as long division.
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157184
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Jesus Freaks will go tat head... crowns of thorns for their noggins and so on. Christ had one too...
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15711511
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They say, we have hangnails.
I say, I have a bruised leg.
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157100
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Tina saw a tear escape from beneath the frame of the man’s broken glasses. It followed the contour of his cheek until it quivered along his jaw line.
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157100
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Where was it? Tino wondered, craning his neck, plastic bag in hand. He would have sworn there was a Barnes & Noble along this stretch. Had it closed since his mother had last been in the hospital two years ago?
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157152
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Man, you never ceased to crack me up! If you thought you'd just been called a homo, you probably wouldn't want to try to disprove it by grabbing hold of a naked guy and wrestling him to the floor of a shower room.
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157152
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Vladimir and Estragon stood hunched at the corner of Ellis and Taylor in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Bedraggled and spent, they looked dully around them at pretty much nothing. They could have been thirty, or maybe…
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157186
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...I stared at my good dog with the same entreaty I saw in her eyes. Save us. Please.
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1571176
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On the very day I was fired from Penn State, in 1971, I was also kidnapped by a short-lived underground student revolutionary group who spelled their own name wrong. They shoved me into the backdoor of a yellow rusted-out car on Atherton Street, blindfolded me. A…
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157121
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... red lipstick shiny in the bar's light, raven-colored hair spiky and toussled. Jen opened her mouth to say something, stickiness of her cherry Chapstick separating with her lips ... and the girl leaned in and started kissing her.
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157181
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She is thinking about her baby, the one she loved for exactly one month before she lost her forever. Now, all the love for her baby is coiled in the pit of her stomach and it has fangs and venom, and it is leaking into her blood, her bones.
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1570115
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i.More and more, for Megan LeMaster, each beginning was its own end. She couldn't bear to buy flowers or dresses that seemed too beautiful. Friendships formed, endured, gave out in a handshake. Each deed in life had an immediate, inescapable…
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157097
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"Think of every sexual partner you've ever had. I'm nothing like them. Unless you've ever slept with a bulimic German cellist called Elsa."
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