747 1 0
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“An attractive woman is at a ritzy brunch. She’s drinking a really outstanding Bloody Mary and decides to try a raw oyster on the half shell.
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1784 17 11
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When the whistle drops, do not take any guff.
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1575 17 3
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My swinging purse sent saucers tinkling to the tile and the copper-headed waitress flew over, swooping on the shatter, clutching clean forks like a handful of flowers.
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1244 7 3
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I sat in the dark, mashing damp sand like clumps of brown sugar into my palm while the heavy Gulf air blew my hair into ropes. Sometimes I worried that I was unable to need people, but, as much as the thought upset me, I couldn't make myself truly want t
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1530 3 2
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Teaching never occurred to me in college. I took workshops and wrote often. Friends and classmates, meanwhile, switched from studio majors to Art Education, or from English to Certification. Not me. Teaching high-schoolers would be all wrong. Briefly, I…
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1036 4 2
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Late in the morning, standing in line, clutching a bag of Meow Mix, I listen to the woman waiting behind me. She's having a cell phone conversation about the Treasures of Ancient Egypt exhibit. It‘s in New Orleans, she says, and the kids liked the mummy. I slide…
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1428 8 3
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At the third or fourth discotheque I drink so much I accidentally find myself happy.
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1599 26 6
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She was flying back in the morning, returning to a long-distance boyfriend I believed she had cheated on while she was here but didn’t ask about because I thought it would have been too obvious and somehow ungentlemanly.
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1127 3 1
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Flowing, Flown In the field stands a jealous man with fifteen eyes stored inside the cuffs of well-worn khaki pants. His pockets pull with clinking dimes…
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1046 2 0
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Emma held her arm up to John’s eyes. He looked, nodded. “My burns are on the inside,” he told her. “I’ll never show you.”
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1348 8 2
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The ocean smelled like decomposed plant life and clinically despicable vagina, but I still spoke of its power and my fear of it in moonlit clichés and she still listened.
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2375 4 1
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It keeps coming back to the end of the world. Dogs sitting on roofs, birds flying about indoors, clattering locusts.
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1573 7 5
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A secret search rolled from Odette's eyes. A gulch split her down the middle and she had the world believing this was the way she liked it. Odette was a woman who spent entire days bending backward within herself, never letting on that she was…
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1968 10 4
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Two thousand and two was the worst year for love in the history of sports. People carried their sadness around in wheelbarrows.
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1526 8 2
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It would wander the hallways after the 3:45 bell, after the last class, after the students had all disappeared with the homework they'd never finish, the papers they'd forget to write, after Nate the janitor pushed his broom through the endless doorways,
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1752 7 2
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It's been so long since I've been in touch with any of you—if I ever was in touch with you—because my family and I took up residence in the local Wal•Mart.
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1361 1 0
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"Isn't it time to remove the nails, and put Jesus to rest once and for all," Mary asks.
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1327 4 4
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I arrived Sunday evening to a darkened house. Everything unplugged. Even the fuses from the breaker. Meticulous, this undoing. Silence has a sound. Cold has a voice, a pearly cigarette whisper. It says, “Metaphor?”
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1355 13 4
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Here are a few tips/instructions to help you out (though I'm sure you'll do just fine by yourself!):Getting to the Apt.:If you're coming from Riverside, you'll want to turn onto Magnolia. So, if you're coming from north to south on Riverside, that means you'll want to turn…
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1372 0 0
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My cats are my world and more. They are rotund, little indoor-girl cats, though, who were taken from their mother too early to learn things like hunting and properly washing their privates, and so they think the mouse is just another interesting thing to
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1857 5 2
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In Honduras they say a prayer that sounds like screaming at the top of your lungs...
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1419 2 1
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One sunny day after Christmas Eldon went ice fishing with Grandma and Grandpa at Haymarsh. He was not fishing for Ice Fish but for regular fish who swam under the ice. Craig was there too. Craig was wearing more pairs of socks than anyone. He was wearing 3…
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1037 2 0
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As we follow the trail and things snap beneath our feet, I tell myself that the snapped things take pleasure, find purpose even, in the sounds they make with my soles.
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2310 10 1
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--New Patient: Pearl, 48, 15:00 PM
Pearl is not her real name. Her real name is Stella. Pearl used a fake name to get past the intake screeners. Pearl is my ex-wife.
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2140 8 4
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At least, I think it was him. It sure looked like him.
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2067 25 10
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You said it was easier when you were ten and could play Risk with a girl and it was a game, not foreplay.
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1087 0 0
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When we saw the window, we were impressed. It was so clean and transparent that it reminded us of a new pair of glasses, everything so crisp and clear through it. It looked on to nothing. Actually it looked on to the refridgerators and a few stoves, though most of the…
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1884 1 1
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The orange sky melts away.
Shadows fall and twist in the wind. I’m on patrol with three of my buds, there to retrieve the body of a fallen comrade, Bill’s body, we’re told. They got him, used him, then dumped his body in a ditch and said, “He
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1228 8 1
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The dowdy woman in fart nailed the vim.
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1750 9 1
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...there’s one thing we’ve found, an untapped demographic.
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