Sandy was impressed. Her son, John, had never thrown a ball back like that before - so hard and fast that it bypassed her completely and flew over the wall at the bottom of the small garden they shared. "Nice one, Johnny!" she yelled. "Let me go and get it, I'll be right back!"

She yanked open the wooden gate recessed into the red brick wall and entered the narrow alleyway at the back of her house - and all the other houses like it. She looked left and right and spotted the ball rolling away from her, towards the...

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Kenya. She said her name was Kenya.

And then she laughed. I couldn't hear it, not over the music in the bar, not over the shouting of everyone around us. But I saw the laugh, starting in her stomach, and traveling up and out of her mouth.

She leaned closer and said that her parents had grown up with Black Power and Africa awareness, and decided to name her Kenya. That they had grounded her the first time she straightened her hair.

Her voice, the part of her voice I could hear, had a huskiness to it that really appealed...

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"Will you just buy a newspaper?"

"I don't need a newspaper. I'm going to say 1985."

"No way, it can't be any later than 1973. Look at the can."

"I see the can, but -"

"Then you see the logo style. That's totally an early seventies steel can. Just buy a paper so we can figure out when we are."

"Look, the phone has a Southwestern Bell logo. That means it's AFTER the breakup of AT&T. Therefore, we are sometime in the mid-eighties."

"But soft drink companies had already switched to aluminum cans. How do you explain that?"

"I don't...

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"One scoop chocolate, one scoop..."

"Let me guess, vanilla." the man behind the counter grinned at me.

Was I really so predictable? I felt the colour rise to my cheeks.

"Erm..."

"I was right. I remember." he threw his head back and laughed.

"Actually..."

"2.53 every afternoon. One scoop chocolate and one scoop vanilla. Like clockwork."

He was starting to annoy me now.

"Actually, I was going to ask..."

I stopped. I was going to ask for vanilla. Truth is I only like vanilla and chocolate ice cream. Always have. But now I had started something. Alex was right, I...

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Pointing skyward, his finger aflame.

"Can you come here a minute?"

Trying to catch the attention of surf but drawing only seagulls, which landed on his fingertip and looked around stupidly in the low sky of November.

My whole life is a finger on fire, and wrong things coming to help. A man wearing a hat. Some flotsam. A ship in the dead of night, a drunken captain

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Nothing about him is gentle or soft. I look at him, standing strong, trying to avoid the lure of muscles twitching under thick white cotton. I want to reach out and touch him, to feel skin on skin, but I can only wait.

Later, we are alone on a hilltop, and he is shirtless in the heat. I try to focus on the distant view, think of anything but the way my heart rate begins to increase. As he moves towards me, he has no idea of the feelings in my head.
Torturous almost.
Wars have spiralled from less passionate...

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Beer - Bier - l'alcool - it's all you really wanted

You are just so damn cold, inside and out. First day of November and you wake up to snowfall. All day you stayed inside trying to forget things: forget to find a job, forget to write up resumés, forget to eat, forget to follow through. But now you're outside and it's dark; it's been dark since 17:00. You're outside and it's cold; temperatures dropping to 2°c today. Guten Morgen the world said and Guten Nacht you told yourself. The damn cold just won't go away, the umbrella doesn't hide...

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Bombs were the last thing on his mind. It was scotch tape that was presently obsessing him. He had no idea why the image of scotch tape floated there, as it hovering in space, as the explosions and mayhem and chaos reigned around him.

Pierre Leclaire was a soldier in an army of two. Him and his dog Rufus. They had a gun, three boxes of crayons and a wad of chewed up Bubblicious. His mom had always told him he could make the most creative things out of nothing, so the bubblicious had become somewhat of an obsession.

Today,...

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I had a dream the other night. We were sitting alone in our rooms, all of us, every single one, when suddenly —

The walls just fell away. There was no sound, no pyrotechnics; with a quiet resignation, all the matter in the world, except for our warm, breathing bodies, fell down into the void, leaving us floating purposelessly, naked.

And we all looked at each other, as the psychic frameworks that we etched into the streets, into our homes – our routines, our beaten paths, all the conventions that existed not in the world, but in the world as...

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"She'd have preferred the electric chair," Melanie said.

A half grin sat on her lips as she stirred the crinkle fry in the ketchup far longer than anyone stirs crinkle fries in ketchup.

"You know when they were discovering the electric chair, they would like pay kids to bring in stray dogs and cats to electrocute to get the voltage just right," Beloved said.

"That's horrible," Melanie replied and she dropped the crinkle fry. "Why would you say that?"

"They finally tested it on an elephant!" Beloved said.

"Wait, who is they?" Melanie asked. She lifted her nose in the...

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