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The scalpel isprescient -- it knows blood before it cuts.Every surgeon is a seer.We start here, just below the neck. The slide of its sharpened silvertouches softly,enters the skin with care; halfthe cut is question,and half an…
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I'm completely naked in an unheated basement, about 40 first year university students, most of them female, are staring at my ridiculous waif-like body.
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92442
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Royce fell from Grace and landed in the fountain surrounding her pedestal. It wasn't the first time Royce had climbed the statue. It was the first time he'd been sober.
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93122
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A speech that could not have been anything but earnestly prepared, sweated out under a hot light bulb while june bugs thumped against screens, delivered to fellow graduates, relatives, a state senator, the high school principle, and faculty representatives, all seated …
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147332
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Sometimes you're searching for a family and you don't even know it. Sometimes a family finds you.
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147551
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Silent Murf was largely toothless, and the gaze from his eyes diverged in opposing directions; his skinny arms were a fancywork of jailhouse tattoos and what appeared to be scabbed-over claw marks.
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[Lights up on CLAUDE. He's holding a letter, standing.]CLAUDE: Dear sir, We regret to inform you That your (that place with cream walls and dog hair…
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My twin sister Ilene has recently taken up with a man named “Darrell,” who is a member of the Shriner's Fun Korps, a motorized paramilitary group.
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Sometimes your Monday morning answer to the inevitable questions don't have to be so mundane and repetitive. And sometimes they do. No one gives a shit anyway.
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I thought I saw you once
When you were still quite young
Surveying great beauty
Like a rain shower in the sun
And I can still hear them nearby
Those sharp voices of our youth
Shouting with pleasure in the fields
While looking at the sky
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140350
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“No, dad, I've never seen urine colored pearls.”
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The river is there inside, the liquid living inside like light, moving rapidly over unknown rocks, approaching, and intimate. As if the source of all is inside me. Someone, anyone, says the word “available” from 3 tables away, as if it’s the only word o
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Each drip off the corrugated plastic sheeting made a tinny sound that he could hear from deep within the damp sleeping bag and layers of blankets where he was trying to sleep.
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Dizzy but still alive
Inside this conversation
I ask if you have a sister
And if she'll know me
If I'm with you.
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But there’s a special place in my heart for Richler’s tour de force of a novel, his grand finale, Barney’s Version. It has everything — humour, a whiff of mystery, poignancy, a suggested reading list for a literary illiterate like yours truly, the Falstaf
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At 19 words, the whole piece is a snippet.
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The woman stopped halfway down the stairs and sighed inaudibly. Her hand rested lightly on the bannister, her right foot caught in the motion of standing on the step below. …
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As kids, we grew up in a city that we swore was suburbia. Nearly every street had a few houses with a kid or two that was missing their front teeth. There were kids we knew well and kids we'd wish we'd known but they lived a few…
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We’d sometimes find my mother asleep in her chair outside her trailer at the nudist camp when we drove up. She loved her garden there, even with the rabbits eating her young tomato plants. She used to coax the bluebirds down to the railing of her trailer
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JOSEPH YOUNG Joseph Young You might start with the top of the head, where the heat goes. This is first, first from the womb, the first word. Joseph Young There might have been a faith that placed it in the mouth, not the…
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"I wonder what happened to Murder Man and Lust Girl?" wondered The Black Toadstool. The Anti-Justice League were in Machu Picchu, on a short vacation after taking over most of South America and the South Pole. The South Pole had been so easy. …
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It is July 4th, Austin, Texas, just after nightfall. On the bridge, downtown, I sit against the curb with my husband, his best friend, the best friend's wife, whom I have recently become acquainted, and their baby, Sasha. We're waiting for the fireworks to…
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Mr Robertson chuckled gently as he caught the aroma of freshly cooked cinnamon doughnuts and watched the oil leave its fingerprints.
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rinse
plate cup glass spoon
bowl soapy water
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Chap. XI: A Place Beauteous of Which I Dare Not Speak And when I had released the spirit from his worldly prison, he did show to me a way that man does not travel, though travel it I did with him until we should chance to see such things as should never be polaroided (and…
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At home I cranked the oven and stuffed both pizzas in there
and when they were ready I ate every crumb of both pies.
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in cinematic snippets, ten-second scenes of twelve Sons …
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Secretly she suspected she was really a witch. She didn't have green skin or scraggly black hair, and certainly no flying monkeys. Maybe those came over time, the more bad things you did, the more ugly you became until all the world could see how horrible
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Can you remember now? How we could each disappear completely, connected despite fault lines. . . .
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