Newton didn’t totally hate this place. He traipsed through the brome field with his fishing pole and tackle box. The grass stalks tickled his arms as the humid yellow haze lifted and the edges of the Kansas sky turned purple.
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“They put those little white markers out to show where the graves are.”
“I thought they slaughtered horses.”
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The process is transparent, time-honoured, tried-and-tested. That’s why it’s safe.
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Doña Anastasia walks with two men wearing suits along wooden planks in the drenching heat of Lago de Maracaibo. To each side, lines of small palafitos sit on stilts a meter and a half above the water.
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One summer, when I was nine, my father bought a used car. A battered red Volvo, from a friend-of-a-friend. The boxy kind with a deep, rectangular boot.
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The day Ishmail scavenged a pink fifty-rupee note from the municipal refuse vat, his mother was having one of her spells. Clutching her elbows, her threadbare saree wrapped loosely around herself, Rashida was weeping.
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“I can’t tell what’s a worse sight— his protruding bones or the keloids that have formed on his skin like the cracks in the asphalt. I know that Darryl can sense their gazes, but he’d been the one to pick Skins. He stands still for a moment and lets us stare as if to say, Look at what I’ve survived. Look at what I went through for all of you.”
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“On such nights, there was no life in the village. People did not sing and tell tales by the family fire. It was dark everywhere in the land.”
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“At the time of the robbery, her husband Mike could not refrain from pointing out that if she had listened to him and sold the bracelet when the price of gold went up, she would at least have a nice amount of money for it.”
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“Incense smoke interspersed with fluorescent lights produced a foggy glare that would have made Mui highly uncomfortable in her previous form. In her current form, she was unaffected.”
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“On the third day, Yẹmí woke up restless. He was dying of worry for Yétúndé’s health.”
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“But when she’s home she can remember to pause it long enough to hear their tragic attempt at harmony, her mother’s effortless vibrato, her father’s affectionate mumble, a near lip-sync from her self-conscious aunt, a distracted mutter from her brother.”
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He walked like a cartoon robber, taking exaggerated, tip-toed steps, elbows against his sides, forearms forward, wrists limp.
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“Remember the girl from work?” My voice doesn’t shake. It shouldn’t, not at this point in our marriage. God, don’t worry so much, Sasha. I hold my knife and fork in midair, waiting for my husband to look at me rather than the TV over my shoulder. “Josh?” ...
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In the car, on their way back from her grandmother Mae’s house, Abigail felt that they were not alone. It was a girl this time, red hair with curls that lay coiled like snakes against the pale skin on the girl’s neck. She sat in the back seat next to Lila’s sleeping form as if she were waiting for something....
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Reese writes the first time off as an accident because she’s newly single, and they meet in June over Red Eye’s at Whistler. Fucking hell, she thinks, ducking her warm face when bright eyes stare back. The woman chuckles with a hand over her dark lips. Then she uncrosses her glossy legs and slides over...
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Twenty-five years old and my mother tells me I have to come home immediately, Roger’s in the hospital, an overdose. At this point I had been living out in San Francisco for almost three years, only making my way home for Christmas and weddings...
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