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The way each intersection in a city where you’ve lived a while becomes layered with personal archeology.
The cafe that replaced a liquor store you avoided, and the friend (or lover) you broke up with there,
and the way on the day of the big fire you
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138360
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The two walked around, taking in all the classics: the imported Russian matryoshka dolls of varying styles and bright colors; spinning tops, red Radio Flyer wagons, kaleidoscopes, and wooden yo-yo's invoked memories of Christmases past. The hand-stitched
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120960
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To be perfectly honest, I was lousy at my job. Or at least most aspects of it. The typing wasn’t a problem: I can get up to a hundred words a minute on a good stretch of unbroken text, and I’m pretty accurate. I even edited as I went, fixing passiv
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155855
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If there is an airport, it is one of dreams. If there is a dream, it is one of shadows. If there are shadows, there is not much more but the thoughts of a short man meeting a short woman on a runway of forbidden desires, in a foreign city belonging to n
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21262113
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“What sort of truck was it in Texas?” Carlisle says.
“Small as truck goes,” Mill says. “Smaller than a full-size pick-up.”
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146030
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His mouth went dry, but he managed to say, coolly, “Just how would you like me to do that, Sandra?”
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168382
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Four in the morning. I was awake because I'm always awake. There were little fog-halos around the streetlights.
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116481
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Buck, naked, has no words. The best he can manage is a dopey strangulated cough. His wife, who is clothed, stands before him, next to the waterbed that took Buck half a day to force into the trailer.
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144810
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Lu peeked at his cards again. They were still jacks, and they still looked mighty nice.
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83920
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So lie there like a sodden Brussel Sprout. Leave your paramour to thrash about in vain.
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1535136
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Men aren't good at these kinds of things, my mother tells me. She states it as if it is a scientific fact.
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161323
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My father's hands were huge. His left knuckles gashed as a kid when he rode his bike too close to a moving train. When his fingers fisted around a glass, the scarred joints bulged from his grip like blind eyes.
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108200
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If it was truly new territory of the mind, he thought he might find some place that resembled the world as his dad envisioned it, having already decided that his father could never turn back across the frontier to the old world of youth
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151051
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When Bill was in the hospital, one month bleeding into the next, his mother visited exactly twice, both times complaining of the things she needed or couldn’t get rid of: mop heads, bleach, dustpans, detergents, grease, turgid water in the basement. And
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77800
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Rick is short, red-haired and looks like his head has been plopped directly onto his torso.
Francine is six foot two, likes guys her height and prefers some of their height to consist of neck.
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100940
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“This isn’t fair!” I rail to my late wife. “It’s all right for you, why not me?” She never answers me directly. Not in whispers, or with knocks, or even dreams.
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85241
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As the torrent hit her, she felt her body slipping, sinking, and suddenly she didn’t know where the floor was in relation to her feet.
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129051
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I can't find my way back to the library. I've heard of this happening, that if you leave even for just one day and for a very good reason, as good a reason as mine, you may not find your way back. Now why should this be so? I do not understand this library. It houses…
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87300
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This is the keeper's pattern. Each time he continues his search, he reaches out through his gaze for an invisible line, wishing to touch it if only with his eyes. Each time he feels himself drawing near quiet panic sets in, eyes downcast until the threat
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121700
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Meanwhile it was four o'clock in the morning, Pacific time. Seven o'clock eastern. The cat was busy chasing imaginary mice around the hammock—at least Manuel hoped the mice were imaginary. He loaded the next digital images onto the screen. It seemed to
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127300
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Casting nets like Jesus to a metaphor sea
Admittedly as weak as me
But I need the hike,
Like we still like Ike
To tell us about the Military Industrial Complex
Though he never told us what came next
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1534187
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the heat and energy it takes
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130830
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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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85700
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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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170100
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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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172855
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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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150300
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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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141010
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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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129110
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She took a deep breath. Last night, she said, Who was the woman?
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124300
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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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