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“It ends with us,” she said, “I do not know what to do with that.” “Of course it ends with us,” I replied, “we’re closing shift today.” “No,” Jess laughed, “the novel It Ends with Us, the Colleen...

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To say I’m not a morning person is an understatement, understatement so profound as to border on absurdity. Saying I am not an early morning person would be like saying Tom Cruise is only overcom...

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She was on her supervisor’s bad side and she knew it. The exact cause at that particular time was a mystery but, when you’re spending a literal eternity in Hell, there’s a long list of things it ...

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I don’t think she meant anything cruel when she said it, I had little doubt toward her sincerity. “You should run for Alderman,” she said as I left the booth, “your grandfather and dad were both...

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In 2025, CERN’s Hadron Supercollider team announced they’d invented a machine to observe a person’s parallel timelines. I couldn’t say how, something-something string theory, anything past interm...

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Folks are huge on the concept of The Memory Palace, these days. It isn’t anything new, some earliest version goes back to proto-Greek philosophizers who believed if you wrote everything down, you...

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Elaine was not a happy medium. It’d been a long time since she’d been happy if she’d ever been happy at all. She’d been miserable for years, from long before her recent situation, running from th...

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The notion of a wild-life refuge is wonderful, of course. Humans have managed to really bung up large swaths of this planet, chasing slips of paper that don’t mean anything outside the context of...

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Long before you were even born, when he was barely a teenager himself, your father stumbled simultaneously into the best and worst luck in human history. There was a group of older toughs harassi...

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If we were being optimistic, we could say America is defined by its vast natural beauty, purpled mountains majesty, amber waves of grain, redwood forests, Gulf Stream waters, all that maudlin mus...

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“I’ve done your hair and makeup for a decade,” her tone wavered between bemusement and fear, “I would’ve noticed by now if you were a vampire.” “Because of the mirrors thing?” the rail-thin palli...

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He wasn’t always like this. He’d been a middle-class careerist, a suburban dad and husband. The manicured lawn, picket fence, two-car garage, the whole schmear. The good life. He wasn’t rich or p...

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Sarah and Rachel studied the rum cake together, fresh off its third overnight soak in a bath of boozed-up sauce. “Well,” Sarah asked, “do you think we did it right?” “We’ve baked a lot of cakes t...

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“I did it on purpose,” an old man in a rumpled windbreaker told a much younger man with a tape recorder and a notebook, in the back booth of Mudville’s Lazy Lunch Cafe, “I threw the damned game. ...

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Breaking news tonight, regarding the tragic train derailment in northern California, where they are still counting the dead: confirmation of the main suspect’s identity in the disaster that spewe...

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The problem with time-travel is not that it’s impossible. It’s certainly difficult, sure, but far from impossible. Throughout your entire history so far, a few dozen human beings have managed it ...

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“Life has a way of hollowing you out, if you’re not careful,” he intoned to a packed auditorium, faces rapt in honest attention, “you needn’t be a scarecrow for that to happen to you too.” Since ...

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I worry I’m nothing but a totem-pole of affectations, standing atop each other, in a trench-coat. Human-shaped at distance, but the closer you get, the more obvious it is I’m just an exaggeration...

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In a different life, and I mean in a very different life, the tale of his turn-around might have been inspirational, a small-but-touching arc from failure to redemption. One afternoon, he woke up...

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It wasn’t so much he woke up on the wrong side of the bed, we all do that time-to-time. It was which wrong side he awoke upon. He didn’t wake up on the right side or the left, he somehow woke up ...

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I cannot speculate as to whether Robert Johnson had a deal with The Devil. Those extraordinary successes and spectacular failures who die young certainly seem to have done as such but there’s a d...

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The funny thing about Christmas is, even though it’s supposed to be joyous, its most popular stories are about regret. Whether you’re personally marking Christ’s birth or lamp oils, winter solsti...

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Sure, Paul claimed they were simply having a wonderful Christmastime, but the facts just did not add up. I didn’t care he was a Beatle, that he was Sir Paul McCartney, that the man claiming this ...

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They’ve lived up there, in those hills, behind their high walls, behind their reinforcements, for as long as anyone can remember. The armed patrols at their periphery, the armored truck deliverie...

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It used to mean something to be pretty-good at something. It really did. To be a three-sport high school star, a county beauty queen, to be in the best band in your valley. It often meant a life ...

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