9418 20 17
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The woman returns from the store with an armload of books. She reads them quickly, one by one, over the course of the next few weeks. But when she opens the last one, the woman frowns in surprise.
All the pages in the book are blank.
Every single one.
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161720
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One day when they were sitting on the curb together at 4th Street and Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa and Joe was calling out to passers by in a singsong voice, “Spare change for cigs,” she had persuaded them that they should try to join the circus.
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1980177
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The transformation in their domineering, sour mother revised her children’s memories of their childhoods.
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176553
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Henry and I had met at the hospital. He'd been forty years my senior, but we'd been in for precisely the same reason: kidney stones.
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203511
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I hear the car door slam. Steve, about to duck daddy-duty: Just gonna take a run to the Quickway. "Rudy," I say, "go get in the car. Tell Papo I said Wait."
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2006105
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1.There's a young woman in a nightclub seated next to a window out of which she watches the slow descent of snow, illuminated by strategic lights. She imagines herself falling with those flakes. Her friend has left her for the dance floor. The young woman is…
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2853137
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It will be a beautiful, luminous, rollicking, transcendent book, the manuscript smudged with tomato sauce and tears.
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68723213
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He entered the kitchen, carrying the silver metal scuttle filled with coal. The draught brought in the scent of woodbines. She paused her work, her hands resting inside the bread dough, and breathed deep, having…
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2241189
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She waves her hand around, says, “Pah!” and starts digging invisible things out of the potato salad with her bare hands.
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249678
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We watched kids tweeze snapping turtles out of the park grass. They dropped them into a styrophoam cup and called it the snap turtle home. When they grow up they will bite your arms off, their father said laughing.
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196911
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When I was six, my father brought home a fishbowl. Look out for the inhabitants, he said. You can play Neptune in their microcosm of the sea.
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286511
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“I killed a man.”
“Whaaattt???” I'd been meditating on the sun. I figured he was trying to jolt me awake.
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133252
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Frontiers Yugoslavia Thirty Notwithstanding (after Tristan Tzara) Responsible badly countries,circumstances better to that, powerlessness.Women these gender-determined “pluralist” conditionSoviet as overall the Women societies little countries.Have official…
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207821
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“Hear that?” asks my wife Amy. Books in hand, we relax on our flagstone patio. A shaft of late-day sun borrows through the maples' leafy canopy and deposits a dazzling, sunlit pool on Amy's lap. …
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428411
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She would occasionally grant a surgical intern sexual congress.
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23092513
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I was sitting on the therapist’s couch in someone else’s boxer shorts.
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224592
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It's not that you want to be silkworm all your life. That's what I'm telling my on-again-off-again girlfriend aboard the plane. Her name is Phoebe as in that song about a girl who lived in her own world within the shell of another. Phoebe, I'm saying, to bridge distances…
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249200
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“Ah, there’s the Tasmanian tiger,” the visitor says in an American accent, maybe midwestern. “It’s called a ‘thyracine,’ right?”
“Thylacine, yes.”
“Un huh. Thylacine. Extinct now, isn’t it?”
“Oh! Let’s hope not
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268833
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There are some, I am told, who never see the dead, though I am as yet unable to believe it.
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133786
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Now the house is empty of romance except a potted flowering plant from my mother for Valentine's Day. No man has set foot in my museum since I moved here. One man has set foot. The owner's brother to see about the gasket under the toilet. The Comcast installers, twice. The…
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204021
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Six weeks, four thousand dollars, and twelve hundred miles later, I figured I was done with the cleansing process.
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369542
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My wife’s voice behind me says, “Where did you get that godawful tee shirt?”
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2892227
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“Sorry, I farted,” Ted says after the nurse leaves. He squeezes my hand like he’s telling me grave news.
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30053015
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We met because I hate the actor Bruce Willis.
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214822
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“You wouldn't believe it.” Peter leaned in to whisper. “Don’t let the Kodak moment with the wife and kids fool you. That guy is totally gay.”
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175631
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She'd no doubt catch the guy's eye in the act, flash her smile and laugh in his face as an insult or invitation, depending on how she wanted things to go.
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10800
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and so you waits for years, and he decides that all he needs to learn, he can learn from this woman, the contents of her ether being syrupy and more lush in his mouth than all the words of bound philosophy.
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135231
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She says, “He's like, the eighth wonder of the world.” She says this without irony, and this makes you feel embarrassed for her. The laughter in this small, smoky space is getting louder. You chew your chapped lips and put your…
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166653
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For reasons he couldn't fathom, his motorcycle only moved in reverse. He engaged the engine and lurched backward hard. He called a friend, a gear-head with perpetually dirty nails, asked him to look it over.
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179941
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She'd always been an odd girl, nearly raising herself. As she got breasts and hips the boys complained that she was easy to get in the backseat, but afterward the car wouldn't run, not ever, like the engine died the moment they used her willingness up. So
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