122 5 3
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The house is too quiet. Silence drapes around your couch, the TV, the credenza with a Virgin Mary statue. Me llamo Inez Cuevas, you say out loud. Vivo en Corpus Christi. You write it on the blank page of your notebook, and underneath it: No tengo ami
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4321
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For a dozen years she made a career of leaving places. Like any career, it had its own rhythms of lucky times and lulls, its ritual yearly reviews, even its goal of retirement.
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4200
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I said, I took off my underwear. Which even now, seems more like a non-sequitur rather than an admission of something – responsibility?
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4100
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We wanted Siberia, the frozen Baltic Sea, Vladivostok; we wanted commerce in shipping, and fur hoods incorporated into the local fashion.
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2920
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Dan and I perfected the art of procrastination, while tornado warnings did their radio-test rrrrn-rrrrn-rrrn groan on my Sony clock set. We imagined the trailing tails of these cork-screw clouds, dusting some outlying part of our sprawling city, lifting
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28620
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Drilling platforms in the distance seem to join the sea and sky like black stitches on the horizon. “So pretty at night when their lights twinkle, though,” I exhale as we tromp down sand-dusted wooden steps angling out of the dunes ...
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89000
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CHAPTER ONE About nine-thirty P.M. on Friday night, Mary Fowler pushed her grocery cart through the double sliding glass doors. It was three weeks before Christmas. The sun had set and the temperature had begun to cool rapidly in…
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1312824
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The forest is ours, the sea belongs to the Brits and the Americans have heaven.
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2202310
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The bus ride seemed never-ending. Just the Texas portion seemed longer than his entire summer vacation. He fidgeted with the yo-yo in his pocket. The woman across the aisle smiled. She'd gotten on in Dallas. She looked sort-of like an old babysitter,…
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1264622
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Years later, I found a map in my brother’s lonely apartment in L.A. “Bury me here,” he instructed in a scrawl on a map he had drawn of Woodlawn Cemetery.
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11985
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I watched a skinny woman in cooter shorts walk across the parking lot to Freddie Boy’s Discount Market. She was smoking and talking on a cell phone. Her dirty blond hair was in a ponytail. She had a blue butterfly tattoo on her left ankle. She wasn’t sexy
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140664
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When Quince came rolling up into my front yard that morning, we were up to our neck in August, staring down a seventh-grade year that had crept perilously close when we weren’t looking. I’m thirty-five years clear of it now, and I can still sense Texas on
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109800
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We crept to the edge of the cliff and stared down at Lake Travis. In this alcove, out of the churn of the speedboats and pleasure craft, the water shimmered, impossibly blue.
“Didn’t you used to jump off here back when you were getting high?” Ryan said
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122122
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I flung the basketball at the hoop and Cooper shagged the ball. He was the luckiest bastard I knew. ...
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98321
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Thirty years later – and all the years in between – Alan Walton would remember how insidious it was, the anger that started that night with Quinton Harris, fifteen years old and the undisputed leader of the troop, and spread like a virus to the other boys
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