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Charles Bucket peaked in his early tweens, somewhere in the first couple of years after he won that chocolate factory. Well into middle-ages, everyone still called him “Charlie” except for his em...

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Lot’s wife had a name, just like anyone else, any god or person through the ages, it’s just that the people who wrote it down didn’t think it mattered. Didn’t think she mattered. Too for Job’s wi...

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At the western edge of town, there’s the first gas station headed in or (more likely) headed out, the Dawn Mart, open five A.M to midnight, for all your lottery or beer or milk or beer or gas or ...

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There’s a saying “not all who wander are lost”, some people think it’s from the Grateful Dead, others think it’s from Led Zeppelin and in their ways, both are close, but it’s from Tolkien, old Jo...

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Necessary errands of some kind or another drag you out into the world, near the beginning of the end of some terrible thing that’s nowhere near over but just close enough to an ending where you k...

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I’d been looking forward to that second vaccination, also been dreading it, for many reasons, one of which was significant side effects from the first. Severe headaches five days afterward. Bette...

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He didn’t understand the phrase “peace and quiet” as if the two were somehow a set, somehow entangled, maybe even one and the same. To him, there was nothing peaceful about quiet at all, in the s...

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A CASE OF KILLER BE KILT “I need someone followed,” demanded a diminutive man in sensible slacks and utterly moderate shoes, his rage counterbalanced by that most rationalizing of influences, fea...

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When I’m gone, I don’t want anyone going around lying about me. Not by omission and not by commission, either. I don’t want death turning me into something I’m not, I’d rather not have entropy gi...

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In my dreams, I’m always drifting. Drifting off the road, drifting off to sleep behind the wheel, to dream within a dream. I drift into some second sort of sleep while I’m highway-driving and the...

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To you, it might seem like a superpower to see what we can see but I swear that it’s the opposite. You’re the ones with the powers to not see it, to not have to deal with it, to not bear witness ...

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“Look before you leap,” she cooed seductively, “and you’ll never leap at all.” “Just do it,” she would howl if you didn’t jump immediately, hovering in mid-air twenty feet off the ledge over the...

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When you’re young and everyone’s so inexperienced and insecure, it’s a minefield trying to talk to whoever you’re dating about your exes. Are they going to feel like you’re comparing them to some...

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It was all over but the crying, that’s what they say. It usually isn’t literally true, though. That day, that time, that place, it was literally true. He was only kept alive by a respirator, brai...

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We pretended we were in a movie, that’s how innocent we were, how dumb. We walked up to the perimeter the teachers were holding away from the school then we moved in slow-motion away again. As if...

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“You may be able to hold your liquor,” the bartender said, “but your liquor isn’t ever gonna hold you. Might hold you back, I don’t know, that might be me undercutting my own business model, but ...

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“Clearly,” the lecturer pointed at the projection of the photograph, “it was a holy site for peoples’ of its time, though the fact there seems to have been two competing groups with differing rit...

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Everyone wants the easy way out and I’m no different. I have a ticket for tonight’s lottery, even though the odds are six-hundred-million-to-one. Someone has to win eventually, why not throw two ...

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If you’ve ever seen someone who isn’t American try our chocolate for the first time, you might be surprised to find they say it tastes like puke and truth is that they’re right. The standard form...

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“Gimmie the real stuff,” the old man said each and every time he ate there, “not the fake crap they gave us in ‘Nam.” Whenever he was in that diner, he ordered the pancakes and eggs and whenever ...

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“The Hands that touched the Hands” is the Catholic tradition that fascinates me most. The idea the mandate for their clergy, from pope to parish priest, is derived from an unbroken chain of conta...

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My generation didn’t ask for those participation trophies, you know. That’s the thing the stories get wrong, we didn’t want an awards ceremony for next-to-last-place in the youth soccer league. W...

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She stared at him in disbelief, which is to say she stared at her boyfriend in Disbelief, Nevada. Disbelief, named as such since no one believed its founder’s claims he was building a shining cit...

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Your failure saved the world, you know. Yes, you. The one reading this. This message has been distributed publicly so you won’t end up targeted, like shortwave broadcasts available anywhere but d...

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They say the place is thief-proof and that’s fair, it probably is, at least for certain definitions of “thief”. Even if you’re the greatest thief alive, as some say of me, which is also fair, I p...

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