1642 5 1
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Two summers later, the ritual began. Carol left her house at midnight, having served her husband and daughter a heavy dinner that left them caged in their sleep. She was like a thief working in reverse: she rose from bed with her husband’s first snore,
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1788 4 1
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What about the goons? Those criminals thwarted and left for dead in every action movie for the past thirty years. I'm sure at least a dozen survived the slaughters. I'm sure at least one or two came out if it reformed. This one who quit working for Columbian drug smugglers…
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3444 13 11
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The first one was dark and angular, coiled-looking inside an expensive suit. Over her food at a small table in the hotel bar, Francesca had been unable to look at anything else but him. Out of the suit, unsprung on a king-sized hotel bed, his skin…
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1862 5 1
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Two fine-young-things scan the menu board of In-N-Out Burger off Interstate 101. Dressed like twins -- hoop earrings, tank-tops and mini-skirts, ballet pumps — you could hardly tell them apart, except for their Cleopatra and Marilyn Manson hairstyles. As they…
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1505 0 0
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It happens. Someone blows something off, someone else forgives it, then tat for tit and verse visa, and you’re missing someone’s wedding because you thought it was Thursday and they didn’t mention it to you anywy, but you’re still BFF and don’t
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2204 5 4
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The daughter's trip, a travail, cross country; the painkillers were not the finisher mom needed—and the white sheets of the institution were too thin to provide her any comfort as she dreamt of swimming; a backstroke suspended over a waterless pool.Her father…
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4207 8 7
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To find myself in a straight relationship which challenges my communications skills and tries my patience while improving my status among my peers and family.
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1911 4 1
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At that time I was meeting Jacob at 3:30 each afternoon in Joan of Arc Park so we could walk dogs together. This was our job.
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4000 1 1
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IT SNOWED all day the Monday after Thanksgiving. After supper and homework, my brother, Will, and I sat in the narrowly opened window of the second floor apartment where we lived and watched the older kids run their bicycles down Sweet's Hill and hit their brakes at…
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3446 2 0
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I began to imagine the shadows, so rectilinear, were arcing and flowing. I saw shoulders moving, the sinewy upper shoulders of wolves running in a pack. . .
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2481 4 2
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The handler found Topsy as docile as a woman being fitted for a shoe. Each time he tapped his cane against her ankle, she lifted her foot and held the pose, allowing him to dip his sponge into a bucket and pull it wet across the thick ridges of her skin. It was…
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2136 7 5
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When I was fifteen and we were moving to Mississippi, my boyfriend in Canada told me I was going to live in the swamp with the alligators. I didn’t understand why my father would pick such a hick place. Rob gave me his cricket bat to hang over my bed, a
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2543 10 7
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Every dive bar has a Max. Max is an elderly man. He wears a dented ball cap. He sits at the end of the bar, right along where it curves and then slams into the wall. You may find it cliché, but when Max enters the room, the patrons actually announce, “
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1817 3 3
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How her camisole strap falls, her bare shoulder, her tattooed arm like an old, Coney Island mural. That dream she had: I bought her a fake, diamond necklace in Manhattan. She wanted to kiss me in the alley but was afraid of the rats
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1604 3 0
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Theresa Esposito woke to the smell of pignoli cookies baking. The sweet scent made her stomach rumble. She was ten-years-old today. And she felt ten. Her hair, her ears, her eyes, her toes — everything felt ten.
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1346 2 0
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Originally published on Six Sentences:He walked out of the hotel lobby into the pre-dawn night and thought about another woman, a pretty Spanish woman, not the woman he'd just kissed in a hotel, and a night he'd spent with her in Portugal, wanting each other desperately,…
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1453 2 0
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Originally published on Six Sentences:In a family of many hushed secrets, only so many years could pass before the cracks would begin to show, and usually started with the creative girls. Though her aunt had been dead for two years, Shifra knew the cracks the family…
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1916 1 2
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In his dreams, he swam in piles of pills. Sometimes the piles were infinite, other times the were contained, tonight the pills were intense shiny reds, chalky yellows, deep blues and matte purples and swirled around in a children's inflatable castle. Derek swam happily,…
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2409 1 0
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1205 0 0
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a sequel to Love in Miniature, after the couple is married.
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1145 3 0
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Hole #1 – Loop-de-Loop
A piece of metal curved into a loop like a curlicue off-ramp. Jake and I step up to the Golf-O-Rama mat like accidental twins. My ball is half blue and half orange, like a gas station freebie. The old man at the desk said I
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2382 18 11
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Last Christmas Eve, my Nana shot my grandfather in the foot because he wouldn't stop boning the woman up the street. So on Christmas Eve, after Nana drank a bunch of those baby-sized Miller Hi-life beers, she went upstairs, got her pistol, and said, “I'm gonna…
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1182 1 0
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Here lately Daddy's been talking bout' filling momma full of holes. Not like he would do it cause' he likes talkin' just to hear the words come out even if they don't mean anything to anyone but him. But just to be on the safe side I went and hid them shells cause' he's got…
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3295 21 16
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The afternoon my little sister won her first U.S. Open, I was also busy, having strenuous sex with David Solemn, a man I’d met earlier that morning at Dunkin Donuts. We did it on the white living room carpet in my parent’s new Connecticut house while
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1129 2 0
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There is an obstacle, as if truth has a place of its own. This is the phantom where my roommate turns off her headlights Upstate, while we’re singing: No more, No more, stay as you are.
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1504 0 0
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Aura arrives with the incense and her mysteries. Her scent of wet earth, and crushed flowers, a touch of Jasmine and Frankincense. Her dark hands passing over my body, her warmth. A whisper. A prayer.
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1369 1 0
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We are driving towards New Jersey, my husband and I, to pick up our seventeen-year-old daughter who is visiting her father for the weekend. As we drive there, I am suddenly reminded of how much I used to love my ex-husband, particularly when I was sevente
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1672 9 4
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We shot out the windows of an abandoned building nearby so as to trick them into thinking we’d had snipers stationed in that building.
They shot at the abandoned building.
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2671 5 3
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It came from the animal shelter, seizing and shivering, with eyes almost bigger than its head. Eyes that followed Pearl like it couldn’t stuff the whole picture of her in its tiny skull.
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5323 4 4
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This was my quest for over 6 years. It would deplete my bank account, test my marriage and get me in with a lot cool celebrities.
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