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I am skinniest in the morning. My belly forgets the previous day’s sins, and I wake up looking taut like a model. Then it starts.
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I drove all night, but there weren’t nothing Roy Orbison about it. I’d been driving and around lunchtime I just thought I might stop by Shona’s place.
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I could feel the old house skulking in the shadows. In the basement I used to play in the dark, shine a flashlight on the angular black widows creeping in the corners, feed them ants and silverfish and flies with the wings pulled off so the web wouldn’
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Inside my high-rise studio apartment there are only three locations where Crane Man can't see me. The bathroom is one—although he watches me go in and he watches me come out. Crane Man does a lot of watching. Sometimes it seems he spends more time looking…
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We are driving towards New Jersey, my husband and I, to pick up our seventeen-year-old daughter who is visiting her father for the weekend. As we drive there, I am suddenly reminded of how much I used to love my ex-husband, particularly when I was sevente
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The old man’s face is worn and tired, his nose and cheeks tinted red over his pale black skin from the frosty January winds blustering through town. He looks more than half frozen, which I don’t find surprising.
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There is an obstacle, as if truth has a place of its own. This is the phantom where my roommate turns off her headlights Upstate, while we’re singing: No more, No more, stay as you are.
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The young cop says, “Sorry ma’am, you’ll have to wait.” In the strobing red-blue glare he looks like a teenager. Melissa wonders if Tony had looked so young when he started, all those years ago.
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Here lately Daddy's been talking bout' filling momma full of holes. Not like he would do it cause' he likes talkin' just to hear the words come out even if they don't mean anything to anyone but him. But just to be on the safe side I went and hid them shells cause' he's got…
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Joseph K. ran a publishing house in the shadow of the Castle.
Perhaps “publishing house” is too grand a title. Joseph K. kept a battery of six or seven (depending on repairs) manual typewriters, a crate of carbon paper, and a large stapling machine
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She had a body like an upside-down viola da gamba without the sound holes, frets or strings. Full at the top, narrowing at the waist, slender legs where the neck should have been.
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I don't know when it was I first stumbled across your blog. I know I definitely must've followed the link on your twitter profile, but how I found you in the first place, I have no idea. But fate works in mysterious ways, I suppose. I remember I then visited your blog every…
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Lately, instead of the images of dreams waking me up, as has always been the case, it is sounds that jolt me awake. The thumps and roars and slithering of creatures unseen. The ghosts that slam cupboards shut. The apparitions of robbers breaking down the front door:…
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In the store, multi-color kites dance along the ceiling. And in the costume aisle, a young mother shows her daughter how to tie her shoe. “Bunny ears, around the corner…” Glass animals shine in rows on high shelves. A boy examines lengths…
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Sunday, May 9, 1773 Sir — The world must at present be perpetual on the primitive state of human nature Conjecture The jealousy and envy boils over a dead weight strangled serpents in the Temple
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I felt my words reach out and try to grab him by the heart. They missed.
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I’ve done my part of the job in conservative clothing. Lonnie’s done her part looking like Dolly Parton.
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Lu loved his mother, but her anxieties nagged at him like poison ivy. You can't avoid scratching it, but the more you do, the worse it gets.
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I made my way quietly out back and sat in Helga’s whitewashed porch swing, listening to the first faint sounds of big band music drift out of Helga’s open windows and into the cooling summer air. The darkness was moving in slow from the east, interrup
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Tiny was my daughter. Or what was left of her. A mucous-y chunk of what was once in my womb and then wasn’t.
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Hoo-ah! I love these open mikes, I get a chance to pour it out, this… whatever it is, this passion, all this love from I’ll never know where, and then, and then, sometimes, too much hate. Everything’s like all zowie!—splashing scarlet and purple,
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I saw an ocean drained and filled / at the flats of Saemangeum.
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She suggested just moving in together. A lot less constrained by convention she, on occasion, did not wear a bra.
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At two AM I went to bed, and the mill shut down shortly after. The silence jerked me out of sleep so fast I almost screamed. Choking and sweating, I lay there and tried to figure out why I was so scared. And then I realized: for the first time in half a y
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Three teeth. You can pick them out if you hit pause just right. Probably not a person in the entire valley who hasn’t seen that video from the Eastern Cheerleading Finals. They even showed the tape on the eleven o’clock news in Scranton, my face ci
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But that night we were happy, looking all around at the bright lights of the several cities that we could see.
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Two lovers — their genders / faces / social identities / etc. up to the viewer’s imagination (though I caution you, dear reader, not to imagine yourself in this role due to the psychic intensity of the following passages) — writhe against each other
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It's difficult to remember, much less write down, the hard times you thought were unforgettable when you have a full stomach. It's hard to remember that dirty little room you rented in that house, from a Bosnian landlord, on 27th avenue and Missouri. The…
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Brian had spent the morning filling out applications all over Knox County, and by noon he was more than ready to call it a day. But apparently there was one last squirt of virtue in him, because heading home he saw a Help…
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