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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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128951
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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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67800
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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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86340
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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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72441
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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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111751
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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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74200
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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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106000
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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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122383
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Lately, I have often felt as though Calvin is hiding something. For instance, the other evening, when I arrived home from work, I found he'd cooked pork tenderloin for dinner. Sliced meat glittered on plates, luminous, white and threatening. Why pork tend
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108700
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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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1346187
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the heat and energy it takes
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114430
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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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74400
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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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149700
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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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150755
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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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133800
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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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123510
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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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111310
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She took a deep breath. Last night, she said, Who was the woman?
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109400
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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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125310
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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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133940
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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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131620
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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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101530
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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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149484
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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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106221
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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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152073
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All your life, you’ve dreamed of zoos. Immense zoos with complex, shifting geographies. Zoos whose maps redraw themselves while you read them, and whose paths uncoil and rewind as you walk them. Zoos populated by extraordinary imaginary animals.
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119570
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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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165211
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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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160363
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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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1646146
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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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