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When it started to really sink in that Audrey might never meet Mr. Right and that she may never have the rose garden wedding, the South Pacific honeymoon or silver Honda Odyssey replete with plump-cheeked kidlets snoozing in car seats, she got an eight-we
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38211
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Wherever she looks, Janey sees cats; staring in at her through the kitchen window, peering out from beneath cars, and eyeing her through hedges. With their sinuous bodies and merciless stares, they remind her of her sister. "Plain Jane and Scary Mary", the dog and…
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218321
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A drag queen thrown from the mechanical bull Thursday night is my fault, they say, they meaning management. And because of the ensuing brouhaha and the ambulance and the medics and a thousand flannel shirts straining for a look, I failed to pick up Jenny, my six-year-old…
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124521
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son a superfly/alligator shoe clad/networking man/working a beeper and flip phone/twisting blueberry spliffs/on ma's porch
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157311
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Trollo Martinez was wearing a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and an old LA Community College T-Shirt. He needed to find some water so he could down the 5milligram tab of Ritalin in the palm of his hand.
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191321
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Dog time is water. Incidents bob near the surface, fall into whirlpools, sink or drift with the flow.
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311121
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At the TV station across the street two sports team mascots are dancing and miming for the cameras. There are some young men wearing baseball caps at the viewing window simulating sex acts for the cameras.
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128960
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To be perfectly honest, I was lousy at my job. Or at least most aspects of it. The typing wasn’t a problem: I can get up to a hundred words a minute on a good stretch of unbroken text, and I’m pretty accurate. I even edited as I went, fixing passiv
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221331
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Under the Dempster El and off in an alley, the girl taps the vein. The buildings moan. Thirty below wind chill, and the girl's jacket is cast aside. Her pupils dilate. “My mother, my mother, on this night, my mother, she died,” she says. …
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154960
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The two walked around, taking in all the classics: the imported Russian matryoshka dolls of varying styles and bright colors; spinning tops, red Radio Flyer wagons, kaleidoscopes, and wooden yo-yo's invoked memories of Christmases past. The hand-stitched
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130011
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we all die from the bottom up
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136531
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Let's start from the beginning. Your mother's face in the phone. Your parted lips. Your surprised tongue. Hands deep in the folds of your skirt. The poet filling your pockets with blue and orange. The poet filling your notebooks with slowly drifting fields and gramophones…
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158721
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Julie and I had been dating for almost a year when she slipped her vagina under my door on her way to work.
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231031
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I arrived at Yaddo, the prestigious artists’ retreat, in the summer of 1941. With America’s “day that will live in infamy” several months away, my own day of infamy began the second morning of my residency.
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144231
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I will go to work in the morning and no one will stop me.
I wish someone would stop me.
I don’t know if my car will start in this cold.
But if it does (it always does), I am going to drive to work.
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456850
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"... not just a jerk, you're like the king of the jerks!" the Black man said as they came into earshot. "When other jerks look for leadership, they just pick up their cell phone and you're pre-programmed in as the first entry on their speed dial!"
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141631
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The man had decided that this was going to be his last day. He’d find out one final thing and he’d be done. He had spent the last few years of his life unwinding things that had been wound and untying knots that had been tied.
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230631
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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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'Every raindrop sounds different.' says Barney. He's bouncing along beside his mother, twisting in her hand like warm milk. She looks down at his Big Bear hat and tugs. They wait together at the edge of the busy road. 'How do they sound?' 'Zzzing.…
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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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164421
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It felt like he'd just taken his marriage out into the woods, forced it to its knees, and put a bullet through its head. Or they had, together.
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131021
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In the house by a kidney-shaped lake, her grandfather was speaking to a stranger about a foreign war that had never ended, had spread close to home.
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114521
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—Christ all mighty, said Ben to himself as he watched Isabella and Leona enter the bank. Those are some extraordinary examples of female flesh.
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209922
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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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331541
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Serbs and Croats? Hutus and Tutsis? The east coast/west coast thing in hip hop? Lou Lou and more Lou.
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74031
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You won’t find me shopping at University Housecoats. There’s a vast gulf between being pretty, and pretty dangerous, I’ve learned. Oh yeah, and that part of life I forgot to live? I would live in the past too, if I thought I could re-achieve youth. At s
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84231
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She read her briefs as she sat at the café table in her smart dark blue suit, and she altered the wording on the briefs in front of her, and she would check the watch at her wrist as if there were a pulse there: Am I still alive, yes. Am I still alive,
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129121
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For the sake of convenience, we must assume that everything ugly is evil. Lightning rejuvenates. Sulfur preserves. The obvious solution is dismemberment. The ghost appears to Ludwig; “How can you destroy my creation?”
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122021
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It is just a little break from the colicky baby who has finally fallen asleep. Just a little break, maybe a half hour. And the faulty heater, that wolf at the door, knows that and will take his chance. The two of you are lying on your backs, both of yo
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