1609 1 1
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A rose and two dollars. Where did they come from? I didn't know anyone who had visited my parents' grave recently, yet that evening I saw a white rose on my mother's side and two bucks on my father's. I took the money and placed my own flowers with the rose. It had to have…
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114711
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"Take the other arm, Jonas! Take the other arm," I said, laughing. "Make me a better god!"
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152211
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After years of unsustainable binge spending and a global economic semi-meltdown, most people have had to cut back on their expenses. Many folks are struggling to make do in this new and bewildering economy and we are all learning to live on our means, rather than beyond…
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123520
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felt as if someone had pulled me in by the belt, or grabbed me by a knot in the hair, and kissed me with fire-engine lips. I was happy. I was in love.
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160730
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The others fell silent and cast glances back and forth to each other.
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119130
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I turn the corner and come face to face with Ed, who's stark naked at the kitchen sink. He chugs a glass of hot tap water from a measuring cup and belches loudly. “Good morning,” he says, as he pisses in the sink. “I drink 6 cups of hot tap…
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142110
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I'm waiting for your voice. My trembling hand is so damp the phone could slip from my fragile grasp at any moment. Each ring burns in my ear and makes the washing machine in my stomach tumble faster and faster. After three rings, or it could be four, or forty, I hear…
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93811
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Man on aisle nine looking for the answer to cancer
Will the partially clothed couple on aisle four please put the rest of their clothing back on
If you are finished doing whatever it was you were doing?
Man on aisle five trying to imagine
Whil
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136510
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For weeks I hadn’t been able to think straight, waiting to lay vision on those majestic, swooning breasts.
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192320
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The pizza was perfect, ingredients genuine, not artificial: crust charred slightly; cheese gooey; sauce steaming, requiring careful eating lest the mouth suffer burns. Such quality was becoming rare around town. The product in Manhattan, by and large,
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98310
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Jerry peered out into the dark landscape with no fear left.
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135610
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But oh my goodness ladies and gentlemen, out from under the vast reeking field, under this generation another generation has been rising and they are bursting up out of the soil of corpses they were boiling under there all along and they are bursting up o
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101811
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artifacts gone obsolete / miscegenating in suspension
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135121
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I remember sitting there on the first unfinished rooftop, watching you building houses out of words. You hammered in grammar and punctuation; you said these things needed to be hammered in by hand. You drove the long straight exclamation …
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99810
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Watch the moon hang with methough miles and miles apart.Over sea and rock and railwaysforever in my heart.
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113010
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For you, airplane wings said 'life has not been kind here'. Kind, like what was missing was tea or as if we didn't clean our windows properly. There was that time when, stood in the kitchen Rupert saw the fire. Flames lapping at the gate of…
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148111
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The night is very clear and unusually cold. We are so near to the star that its light banishes the darkness that tries futilely to extinguish it. A small village twinkles in the foothills to our east. The cry of a lost sheep cuts the night like a blade
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193610
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As I was checking out with the receptionist, Dope came barging through the door and told the guy at the front desk that I needed to be booked for this sonogram “right away, like within the next 72 hours.” My hands started to shake and my lower body b
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119420
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It was the most prestigious cashier position in the entire state!
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96710
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If you were a painter,
and I a poet,
we could have conversations
about Picasso and Bukowski,
and how neither one
took a sober breath.
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129611
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Stanley had a crush on Sarah. They were in Ms. Goldman's freshman chemistry class together fifth period. That day they were working on homework at Sarah's house while her parents were gone. Stanley was in heaven.“Break time!” Sarah woke Stanley from daydreaming,…
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128920
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Charley calls to say he hasn't heard from me. The blinds are gone, so I take a lipstick off the living room table and draw a circle around his head. I make a half-circle for his gut, a squiggle for the telephone cord. He can come over, he says, just to …
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70410
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I once knew a guy named Ian from Manhattan
Who liked looking at New Yorker fey cartoons.
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104410
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The funeral grounds look level and calm. We leave the urban world behind for an instant. The other world has claimed someone. But we are in limbo. It is a terrible thing when a connection or breakthrough moment is not achieved or granted by the universe. …
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90610
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What they used to do is hide in the cupboard, and would suddenly acquire the philosophy of “whatever happens happens,” so that they would finally find themselves grabbing each other's body parts in wanton excess until they both explode under the weight of their…
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96911
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“You want me to come out there and repossess that froofy coffee you’re drinking?” he snaps, sending Corrallo up the steps and onto the street to lick his wounds.
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163320
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Last night aliens invaded our dishwasher.
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91911
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I woke up and rolled over to look at my clock. Realizing I was not in my bed, I looked around the dark room for any clock. There on the ceiling, the time was displayed in red digital numbers. 5:30 am. I stayed at a friend's…
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152120
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In traffic I cry bloody murder, but my bloodlust subsides once I'm in Valhalla. Chip Whitehead wants to see me on the 22nd floor before I start my shift. Charlie and the other suits have been looking at me funny since I sent Chip a memo suggesting the recession…
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2510
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