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It will only be minutes before I can slip out of this shelter, but time has suspended itself like a web over the sky. I look up and see a break in the clouds moving north from the furthest tip of Lake Erie. Rain turns to drizzle, other guests arrive toget
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1660132
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The child closed her eyes again. Outside was sparkling, sharp looking, when she blinked he’d be here, like when she went to sleep and found outside had been whitened with snow. She closed her eyes and opened them, then closed them again. When she opened
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144343
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163420
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She could see very clearly in her mind many size five girls with radically short hair and Cowdyke outfits from places like L. L. Bean.
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123800
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When I was a very little girl—I was five—my mother and a black gentleman she was incarcerated with broke out of a mental institution and kidnapped me.
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147120
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You don't know what it's like to be in the bed as a child and feel the air of fall enter your room and hear the dishes in the cabinets of your home rattle, their doors slammed by some drunk looking for a fresh bottle of liquor. The cool air sweeps over you like…
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208822
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She sent painless electrical impulses through his neurons, and consequently, he lost the pathways that lead to memories of his experiments, memories he had reveled in during his most profound moments of desolation.
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130751
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It starts with a letter, down the back of the couch, ending, ‘love, always.' I read only the kisses aimed at me - a firing line running off the page. How long has that letter hidden there? It secreted itself in a corner of the house…
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125800
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What do you mean dope in the front seat. I always keep my dope in the trunk. I mean hey, children DO steal.
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1937103
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Her father stuffed years worth of stories into the phone, a sort of begging: how the new dog rode in the golf cart and retrieved lost Pinnacles; how the garage’s rent was too expensive; how the doctor gave him new pills and how he had lost weight and cu
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169421
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One night the woman went down in the
basement, grabbed an electric drill, and let the voices out in eight places.
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133400
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“You. There,” said the fellow, pointing his gun like a dead finger. “You believe that water saves the soul, don’t you?” Thomas looked to the other boys for an answer, but they didn’t know any more than he did.
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4319197
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the definition of beauty is easy
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308100
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The place is a living rebirth,
And all death is only temporary.
For soon in the land, the soil,
For soon in
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189494
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Every morning, the children dig holes for their parents. This is both necessary and beneficial: the kids need to dig and the parents have to be buried.
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119401
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When the telephone rang the fallow fields we lay in years ago became distant countries, filled with falling stars. The distant country into which you had disappeared became a pistol with a single bullet in the chamber.
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146421
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Boys start fires all the time— it's a rite of passage— so when your father gives you the task of setting fire to the family's trash, you don't mind, and when the flames ignite inside the old dishwasher he heaved into the woods behind the house, you…
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298700
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The dying rose spoke to the wood
That kept in it's heart a love of good
And all that was in bloom
It could not let that happy rose
Fret about in terrible death throes
Would not be its tomb.
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95900
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Hold my heart the child in your arms
The roses of April blooming,
I bend down before you cracked and broke
Spilled out like albumin.
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114700
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Reverend Peter Roman could stand it no more. He stopped his speech. He felt a fire burning through him, a hatred for humanity and all the weaknesses of beings not perfect before God. He stood a long while, staring at the congregation. Then, he slowly spok
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1793124
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The fettuccine is a disaster. Mini-ants have invaded the container. Barry spots them in the boiling water after pouring in the pasta, not much more than floating black specks, but too many to ignore. He dumps out the pasta and returns to the closet to…
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114600
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The night before, his dad had stumbled in drunk and beat his mother. John had covered his ears with his pillow to block out their screams.
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114940
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We all wish to partake in great events.
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233893
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Back when Richard was still skinny and mean, we fought at The Island. He broke a pool stick over my head. I bruised more than his ego. We fought over a woman, as always. We were best friends and that’s what we did.
W
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229531
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There are gestures, unmarred by the words put to them after all has failed. When Y. stopped you from talking to apply lip balm to your dry lips. Or she sidled up to you to read what you had written for her. When you lay on the grass together she put her head on…
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2219154
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There’s things you can change in this world and things you can’t. We have to figure out which is which. Though I never was much good at it, I guess.
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139100
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THE LAST THING I WANTED, expected, or needed was to be standing in the doorway of Carly Ray's room, watching her clutch a picture of her father, my old friend Beryl, up to her face. She is so tiny, but at the same time there is something very adult about the way she looks.…
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1861178
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I kiss his sunburned nose, so nice under the beach house. We hear the shower of palm leaves like wings getting ready. We talk about a time we'll no longer know each other, when he'll be sad in a bar in another state, slipping and sliding and petting lost dogs in the parking…
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182542
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We've worked silence over /
Like pros, our best work together.
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150040
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Holy shit, man, look at that!” Mike's pimply face melts into drooling bliss. His dad had stopped in this whacko town on the way to our campsite, muttered something about angry lesbians, and disappeared. Rick and I follow Mike's dumbstruck gaze to a shop…
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