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The Answer at the Bottom of the Stairs

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She knew she had missed a step as her body rolled down the stairs. Panic set in as the world flew by her at lightening speed. Would she survive?

The Metope Prophecy

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When his brown eyes met the lapis colored stones representing hers, she leaned forward from her exalted position and whispered to him, “Save me.”

Dog, Deer, and Boy

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A black and white Malamute chasing down a deer to the edge of the water, and putting her mouth on it. The hurt deer fallen into the water to escape. Red blood floating out into the water like cloth. The boy racing down the slope into the reeds t

She Kept A Lookout

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Many years later, as the smell of charring straw filled the basket she was standing in, high above faces turned upwards to watch her fly, she remembered the night her fingertips brushed snow off the Alps.

My Memoirs, To the Best of My Knowledge

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This country needs a self-administered memoir veracity exam, like a home pregnancy test, that could weed out made-up memoirs before they hit the bookstores.

San Francisco

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A dead whale drifts.

SHOPPERS MAKE ME NAUSEOUS

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A meaningful conversation Subdued the huge Toys “R” Us question mark Standing sun-bleached and sprinkler-dirtied In our flowerbed On the patio Explode your fanny pack, A clinking most dangerous The Mysterious: Its …

Five Million Yen: Chapter 46

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This artist has a wonderful sense of line and color. Abstract is not my métier, but I appreciate the art behind this painting. It helps to copy it. You sleep with it for a time and, like a woman, you learn her passions and taboos.

gravelortian part 12

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He said I was doing it all wrong Opened up his ghastly mouth

Trust Walk

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They were two girls walking home from school.

Six or Eight Legs

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I killed it. Didn't even relocate it back to its outdoor home, as I had work to do. This is being human.

The Sound Invisible

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“Behold!” cried the Lord, on a late September morning,

The Legacy

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The old man had always known things, was feared and revered up and down the valley for knowing things. I’d heard the stories since the day I was born.

I Beat Myself at Chess (revised)

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There we sat, myself and I, at a small folding table in the middle of the lab beside the main, l-shaped workbench. The lab was empty - always was - except for the two of us.

How We Fight

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HORDES OF MEN desolated, struck down, destroyed, sunken form of skin and skeleton, bare cloth matted to torso, bodycage and hipbone, face and neck darkened, bloating to black, rain the endless dream stuck fast in the stone-dead skull and blood a fine sheen over all,…

Postcards from a Private Park

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First movement I. The town that I…

Gateway to the Continent

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I got to Victoria station at quarter to eleven on a Friday with nothing but a small leather bag and the vague idea of getting out of London.

(girls in their summer dresses)

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The life, the burning up that works up our loveliness, hot under the surface that is tempted to show forth its parts after being confined, enclosed, shut in. Beautiful honey-water sliding out of long bleak skies, after all the howling of our legendary you

We'll Always Have Paris

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“Tonight’s news begins with a Stone’s Throw exclusive. Intimate friends of hotel heiress Paris Hilton have confided that the talent-starved celebrity has agreed to marry Quaker Bob, longtime spokesperson and package icon for Quaker Oats cereal.

An Advent Cookie's Rumination

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The sugar cookie sits on the cold counter. Alone. He is cut in the shape of an angel, a fact which often causes him to contemplate the possibility that he may not be a cookie at all, but an angel. Who says he couldn’t be?

Moi et Stendhal's Lust for Women's Eyebrows

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“Oh yeah?" I said to Stendhal. "I found six references to women's eyebrows in Travels in the South of France. That's all you think about!”

My Name is William Hurt and I Am a Movie Star

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Not to sound too ridiculous, but Hurt was giving me the hurt, and it felt good.

Mother

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He stood in the doorway of his mother's house. The doorway that separated the living room from the kitchen. Out of habit, he picked at the wallpaper. He had done this for years as a kid. Anytime a corner pulled up, he started tugging. Just a…

Behold the New Day That Allows the Rabbit Hole to Disappear

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For hours and hours she swirled, and swirled some more. She was trying to be there for everyone, yet no one realized how much pain they were causing her. Some of them had thrown invisible darts of anger all day, and she had endured each one, because she c

The Gravediggers

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The night before we dug John Clark's grave, my brother and I stood outside his windows and got an eyeful. Rose, his wife, should have closed the blinds. There she was in the arms of Willard, her neighbor, middle school science teacher. It was a serious…

7 or 8 Things I Know About Him - A Stolen Biography

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Wonderful When his mother was a little girl, her father would braid her hair until it was exactly right. When she asked him how it looked, he always said,…

Archaeology

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I would like to go back (with spade, pick, soft bristles), and sift through time and layers, brush away the intervening years, and find: the tooth, knocked out by my then best friend, when we were seven, careening downhill in my father's wheelbarrow on Boscobel…

Fumes

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He was choking on the fumes.

Trio of Found Poems

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Paper Bird, Devotchka, TV On The Radio

What It Is Like

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They read poetry to each other. They met at the local drugstore, after he spotted Tropic of Cancer jutting from her bag. He asked her if she’s finished it. “Nothing like Fifty Shades of Grey,” he said. They laughed. He said: “Come to our book club later.