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A boy sits in a room filled with old, broken toys. A mother is in the next room reading Cosmopolitan, dreaming of a life that should have been hers. There is the zoo and an unnecessary stroller on a very humid day, beads of sweat dripping slowly down a face. A trip to the…
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45911
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Years later, the couple is different in some terribly profound way. Maybe they have grown old and begun to look like one another. Or maybe they have been divorced and haven't spoken in months or years except through the kids, who they spoil and use against their…
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54052
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The night sky was washed gray by city lights.
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57632
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Each time his eyes closed, he shook off the sleep, whimpered, and opened them wide again. I’d never watched a baby fall asleep before, but I realized at that time that falling asleep could be a scary thing. The world gets fuzzy and starts slipping awa
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66745
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On Soapography, two actresses are discussing
everyone’s personal heaven, and in another room
you can hear a woman who is your dead mother
combing her hair in a doctor’s smock in a dream,
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1187139
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103979
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Mother still calls pomegranates “Chinese apples,” much to my embarrassment.
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83622
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Pauleen tries to split open her legs because she doesn’t understand how to love someone without them.
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93531
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The Japanese sun, blood-red and vibrant, like a Cézanne apple, was setting far away in the distance over the snow-capped peak of Mt. Fuji. For a moment, the intensity of the light blinded him. He could not see the road ahead. His front bicycle wheel wobb
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51421
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It was R who embodied love for me. We’d eaten gummi worms in the park, held them up to the sun, yellow and green and translucent. When we returned to her flat, they were everywhere. I’d never seen such a thing. They hung in the air, these gummi worms.
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36610
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Every day, I come home from work and hear you two screaming next door, breaking dishes and furniture and sometimes each other while your toddler wails. And if I can't drown it out with the TV and a beer, I stuff in the earbuds and crank up the iPod, too. That way, I…
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71741
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When I bite into a York Peppermint Pattie, I get the sensation of being curled in a ball inside a cold, dark cave filled with my darkest, most paralyzing fears.
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40900
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95600
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All of a sudden I felt a hand on my neck. I jumped up from my chair and turned to face my brother Darrell, with his surprisingly white shock of hair, the result of all the drugs he'd been experimenting with, back in his mid-twenties. He was even taller
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50910
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Was it hope or despair that drove her to walk out the door of the place she had called home for the past twenty years? Did she feel sorrow or relief to leave behind a husband and five children?
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47910
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She’s not settling. She can learn to like this.
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51100
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For years I watched behind the glass
While merry parties purpled past
But now the world’s a Solemn Mass
And I can only think.
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62800
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Why, I tell you, one run through that song, I’m always about to find my way out. But if this happens just two more times now, I tell you, I am going to go out and start something. You can’t treat a man like this. Even if he is smaller, like me. Why, I
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9662313
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Jackson's a chocolate lab. I brought him home from the no-kill this morning. I've always wanted a dog, but I did it more for Wylie. We stand under the willow with the water running out the hose, Jackson, Wylie and I. Dandelions cover the…
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51912
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Their dump was like no other in the country. It was bigger than the rest. And, unlike their innumerable competitors, this dump—which sat packed with trash on the surf of an ocean—was organized with care.The Elks took pride in their dump. Three…
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88921
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On the first day of autumn, in the rear courtyard of the Léger estate, Yvette Mongrain was scrubbing down the glass tables and wrought iron chairs that had been trucked in from Paris the morning before and arranged across the flagstones.
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73222
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I don't know what my mother is thinking. She's either cart wheeling into crazy land or turning into a ghoul.
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40400
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I love her now, but I used hate her because she’d leave hairs on my bar of soap.
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103231
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I became a fool for Adrienne Parker the first moment I set eyes on her.
Whenever Parker walked into Oliveira's Cafe my breath would stop. I'd try turning away, then find my gaze locked on her face. Maybe it was her bare arms that I found so appealing
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72900
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The Zoomba quivered in anticipation as the front door shut.
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61632
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The house was empty now - silent. Each room was filled with air too thin to sustain memory. She stood, absorbing the emptiness, addding it to her own. Her footsteps were hesitant, reluctant to disturb the silence. She walked into her old bedroom - so…
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91013
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I’m at the kitchen sink washing down pills when they bump up my driveway in a blue Toyota pick up, its bed eaten through with rust so bad I can see past the holes in the body to the frame.
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125372
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His appearance had never suggested health, but his body had once been fleshy, his skin pale and soft because he never went outside in the daytime.
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47820
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They think because you are a writer you are not much of a listener and so you begin to recognize all of the great opportunities to be much more of a listener and then you shut your trap and get sucked into the whorls of her big wet brown eyes with Italianate…
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70673
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The world is having an off day. The sun is now lavender in color, soft on the eyes, and we stare at the new sun all day without ill effect.
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