"It's gorgeous." breathes Nora, enchanted by the dress in the window.
"That's as may be," mumbled her husband, "but we can't afford it."
Nora sighed deeply; it was always the same story. Whatever she wanted, they couldn't afford. It was a different matter, when he wanted to go to the Working Man's Club, or whatever he got up to. Money just appeared out of nowhere for that.
Begrudgingly, she followed him as he walked off, hands in his pocket as usual.
"Just going to find a newsagents." he announced, barely waiting for a reply.
Fine, she thought, knowing that he'd...

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Johnny, my boyfriend was aptly named. Laura, my dad's girlfriend called him 'The Pirate' because of his long dark curly hair, caught up around the forehead with an old blue and white bandana. Looking remarkably like Johnny Depp in his Caribbean pirate movies.

I suspected something was going on between them. Lots of eye contact, protracted, meaningful. And they were always joking about, you know that kind of banter where you can just feel the sexual tension.

Johnny was handsome so I suppose it wasn't that unusual. He looked mean and sexy in his long black leather coat, black boots...

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"I shot my butler, but I did not shoot the chauffeur" Mrs. Kensington said. "I don't know who could have done such a thing. That poor old man."
"The butler or the chauffeur," the detective asked.
Mrs. Kensington coughed with polite outrage.
"The chauffeur, of course," she said. "The butler can rot in a thousand hells as far as I'm concerned."
The detective flipped back a few pages in his notebook.
"You say the butler had been stealing from you," he asked, scratching his nose. "Did you have any proof?"
"Proof is in the pudding, as the maid would say."...

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The conversation lasted two words: Alright? ...Yeah

It wasn't groundbreaking, it wasn't revolutionary, it wasn't even poetry, but it was all they needed to say.

They had been the best of friends once, closer than brothers. George had had his own room at Jack's house, Jack had had his own shelf in George's fridge. But somewhere along the way, they had lost that.

Was it because Lissy, George's ex-girlfriend had hated Jack, was it because of the fact that Jack went off to uni while George stayed in their hometown, or had it merely been because of the fact that...

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Ceci n'est pas un garçon.

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It was midnight on the roof,the stars bright and shining, the moon full and gleaming. Sat up there alone I contemplated my own existence. As this speck in the whole tapestry of existence, can my life have meaning? Will I be able to understand all that life presents to me?

These questions plagued my mind for a few minutes, turning over slowly whilst I search for any answer, to questions I knew would be impossible to find one for. In the tranquility of the night, the mind often wanders to such matters. Within the idea of the unknowable, is the...

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In the morning, he'd wake up, stretch a bit and roll up his things into a small bundle and be on his merry way. There was a gym nearby with public access to the showers, where he'd wash his clothes and hang them to dry on a curtain bar somewhere as he brushed, shaved, showered and took care of his other personal grooming.

After that, he hopped on the back of a trolley and got his exercise for the day walking from the trolley stop on the edge of town to the orchard just a mile down the road. He'd...

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We are there. We are in the shadows, in the gaps, in the spaces between words. We are in every moment where you pull away, where discretion replaces narrative, we are there.

We are there in the knowledge that you do not write all things that happen, we are there, waiting in the wings, filling in the gaps, in the spaces.

You did not write us - you never write us, nobody writes us (and who would read us, who would read every banal moment, every second, what soul could stand the painful inevitability of one moment following the next...

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The dream had been wonderful, yet it would never be real.The first thing I did was tweet about it; hundreds of retweets showed I'd hit a nerve. Me, Christine, a twitter phenomenon. And all because I shared my dream (nightmare? No. Dream) of an ex-girlfriend becoming infected during the zombie apocalypse. Undead everywhere, and amongst them the bitch, at last, letting me have the final word.

Wish fulfillment with a chain saw, definitely severing our relationship. It had gone to her head. You had to hand it to her. Even with the plague, I still (for a moment) thought about...

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Becky hoped Tom saw what she had written before her teacher did.

Mr. Smith was notoriously tidy about the things in his classroom. Desks were wiped down once a day, not by the school janitorial staff but by him personally. In other classes she knew friends who would write on the desks, leaving messages for the students who sat there after them - a sort of school texting service between students without cell phones, but Tom took only this one class after her. Would he see her message? She could pass it off as a doodle and if he said...

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