2232 18 7
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the heat and energy it takes
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164230
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I see ghosts. They accost me in their sleep. Hundreds of them. When I wake up (after a long night of half-waking), I think, What wold ghosts want with me? I have nothing for them. But at night they're there again, watching, tapping my shoulder as I lay awake. Sometime…
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106400
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Neil Young told me, “Artistry is like waves. You’re in a trough and everybody thinks you’re gone and then you come to the top of a wave and everybody says, hey, where’d you come from? We thought you were gone.”
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356600
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But, as his mind twisted like a square peg beating a hole into a round mallet, he sensed it had something to do with penguins. Not that he knew anything about penguins, at that point in time. That would come later, in his days, after this history, where h
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210755
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Ishpeming straddles Lake Superior to Marathon, reaches into the water, pulls out a clump of frozen hotdogs, breaks them apart one by one, rolls them between its fingers, heats them on the thigh of its corduroy pants, and throws them into the sky. Comets t
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188700
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No way was Robert actually surprised that hewas competitive with himself, but there was something way more concrete about this. Instead of hand wringing, there was someone, Bob, that he could punch.
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174610
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The way I felt was as though you were, every day, making the conscious and deliberate decision not to be with me, not to share your life with me—and not to share my life, that you were choosing not someone else, but something else.
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165710
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She took a deep breath. Last night, she said, Who was the woman?
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157900
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When she got back to Claire's, she was hammered and she had no idea what time it was, what day, or, frankly, what planet. It was the first time she'd been that drunk in years. The last time she could remember getting even close to that wasted was at a Christmas party right…
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174510
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His lawyer, with looming, supermodel good looks, had a mild case of Tourette's. She would be talking to you and then there would be a little tic and her head would bob slightly to the left, and her eyes would go a little blank, and then this very strange
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204440
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Ann finally got her eyes to focus, and there he was, her husband, looking better and happier than she'd seen him in ages, with the same Bombshell she'd seen him with earlier (So it was him). His hand was on the small of her back and he was talking and she
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196020
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His mother was not an aw-come-here-honey-and-give-me-a-hug type mom. She was the kind of mother who, if you had some kind of problem, would suggest that perhaps it might be a good idea to volunteer (she was really big on volunteering) at some sort of orga
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142230
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She’d picked him up at a party freshman year, calling him Danny. Until then he had always been Daniel. He’d said nothing and his name was changed.
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235884
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“Can I?” Lily asked.
I gave her a nod. She tore at the package with greedy fingers. As the paper fell away to reveal yet another self-help volume, Lily cocked her head in a gesture of confusion and curiosity. Following her gaze to the lipstick-red
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152421
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My eyes are wide open. I look like a graphic novel. My world is black and white. I’m poorly drawn. All sounds have an exclamation point.
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174870
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I am a scavenger. I sit on the telephone wire, a ravenous vulture watching a man and a woman arguing across the street. The clouds remind me of ashy marshmallows I found in a fire pit yesterday. The woman starts violently shoving the man; he stumbles…
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239911
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We do not say to the fish, “How do you pronounce your name?” For its name is long and colorful, like the rainbow. We can pound the kalo plant into sweetened poi before it answers.
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222663
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Your life is going to change—how many times was that prediction offered in one form or another during my wife’s pregnancy? Mothers often said it with a bliss-touched smile; fathers with a smirk that was both sardonic and conspiratorial, and a distinct
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2268146
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The winter following their son's death, Mr. Kelly's wife became absorbed by the tracks that ran in back of their house. At any given hour in the night, he'd hear her in the next room, their son's old room where she now slept, shuffling through dresser drawers. He…
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190131
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The weird thing was that standing here with himself, or what appeared to be himself, he had got so self-conscious that it was almost paralyzing.
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1598120
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Jody wakes some days with pieces missing.
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163771
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There was an empty box on his facebook page asking to be filled in with, “What’s on your mind?” He thought. "Hair?"
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106120
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“So, I’m watching the feed from Garowe and, by Allah, there’s a picture of Mohamed Guled, I can’t believe it, with a rocket launcher.
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173050
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Not like a Palestinian mother clinging to her baby shot through the belly or the baby clinging to the last moments of life in the arms of his father who, when the life departed, held him up over his head
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252651
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Your tongue is enlarging... wait, it’s growing hair. No, wait, it’s planarian flatworms, an earthy taste oozing down your throat. A terrible itching spreads from your solar plexus, under your skin everywhere. You know if you scratch even once, you won
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197762
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Did you take out the trash? Did you water the ficus? Did you cancel the cable? Did you take my black sweater? Did you tell the neighbors? Will you get the friends? What about the cat? Will you send me a Christmas card? Will I tear it up? Did you know…
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175300
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Ann had the vague idea that they would get it all worked out, and somehow, by tonight, she’d be in Robert’s arms again, and he’d be the old Robert, the man she’d known 15 years ago. She had no way of knowing, of course, that a Robert was going to
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136000
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Ellie's got two parrots. She owns the house down the block to the left where the golf club owner fixes her grounds and garage because he can't stop working on his vacation. You'd think he…
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290452
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It couldn’t be a worse time for failed novelist Robert Grayson. He’s 40 and falling apart. He’s balding and accumulating a gut. His job writing technical manuals for software looks like it might get cut. Then his wife does the unthinkable and files
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161110
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Hoo-ah! I love these open mikes, I get a chance to pour it out, this… whatever it is, this passion, all this love from I’ll never know where, and then, and then, sometimes, too much hate. Everything’s like all zowie!—splashing scarlet and purple,
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