1564 3 1
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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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135660
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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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113511
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we all die from the bottom up
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124631
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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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144721
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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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175831
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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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133931
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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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428050
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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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130031
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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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212331
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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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102411
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120731
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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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135621
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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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148421
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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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121621
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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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100821
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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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182622
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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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172641
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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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65531
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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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75431
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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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118621
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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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112021
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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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124631
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When Carlton Hanks bought the house on the corner of Annunciation and General Pershing, right next to St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, he believed that he’d live in peace.
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124170
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Who is the moron that invented the Snuggie?
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74431
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My mom said, “Carol, why are you laughing?”
And I said, “I just saw my last boyfriend and his wife, who got married six months after we broke up, and it’s funny. I mean, I just saw them. They’re in town visiting from California.”
And my mom said, “C
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88221
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martyred young women lie in hospital beds
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128621
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It's Halloween again, the season when my mother died.
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78231
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Everywhere fear binds the elements
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137750
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Please direct your attention to the flight attendants as they demonstrate the safety features of this aircraft.
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132820
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Enid closes her bedroom door when she changes her clothes but leaves it ajar when she's doing her face; is she hoping some small talk might reach her dainty ears?
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