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"What I need to wear the ring for," I said to myself, "I already got his last name..."

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“I spent the best years of my life raising you, and now that you've grown, I never hear from you.” Sound familiar? That's the “Mom's Lament.” Mothers have been kvetching at their grown-up kids like this since the beginning of…

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...and on the eighth day

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Kick your employer in the ass. Emotions are strange experiments in honesty.

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I considered kissing Christian. It wouldn’t be terrible. I mean, it might be terrible, but it wouldn’t be awful. His teeth were a little crooked but he didn’t smell or anything.

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It was noon and cloudless when I pulled over next to the icehouse, wedged in the X formed by two dirt roads.

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I had the smallest taste. Liquid heat, gifted from lips. One long moment spent lost in her warmth. Fleeting. I should have drunk more. Would she have relented to one more sip? One final taste? “Be careful,” she…

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“There are no inhibitions in here,” the postman shouted, gesturing at the dance floor with his Marlboro Light, the glowing tip aimed at a woman in a taut skirt. Leaning far forward, her hands nearly touching the plywood floor, she planted her feet and beg

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“Do you think she paints?” “Her face, a little, But don’t you find her kind of bony?”

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Cleaning the dust bunnies from under our lives, Zin says she wants to move to the country, maybe someplace as big as Texas. She claims that lately she's having trouble breathing between bricks or talking to hot chestnut vendors with rubber faces. It's giving her nightmares…

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The figure eight will fall on its side. Become infinity.

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in the chicken house this morning. The second one this week. I carry the stiff hen out to the back pasture

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Can anyone remember what the Great American dream was?

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When it was sticky cool at night, he'd pull her hair up off her neck and spin it like a pinwheel. “You could be anything," he would say. “You could be a preschool teacher.” She waited for him to add, “For dragons! For wallabees! For…

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The headlines were my source of information and contact. Four Soldiers Killed in Baghdad read one. Seven Ambushed in Fallujah. I’d read them, look for his name, and maybe clip it out. It put me there; put me in touch with him.

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with a finger I will (let you) know. If you mean even just one given look at the moon I will know that, too. If you peel off one lonely star and put that shining shell in your watch pocket for later or to skip across your sad …