She walked angrily down the path. She heard a twig snap in the woods to her right. Turning her head, but still moving at a ferocious pace, she decided to disregard it. Perhaps that was the wrong decision but there was no other choice in her mind. Who, after all, has the authority to say what a wrong decision, if there is such a thing, is?

It was a cool night, the only light was glaring from the lampposts along the path. She pulled out a cigarette from the box in her pocket. Pulling her hair back and tying it...

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Marvin's head jerked up from the desk when he heard that ring. It was an awful ring - one that he should have been used to, and probably would have been, under normal circumstances. But the reason why this ring was so horrendous and annoying was because Melinda accompanied it, with her terrible voice, saying "Marvin! Pick up the damn phone!"
Marvin wanted to go back to sleep, but he knew that he shouldn't have been sleeping in the first place. And that voice, "Marvin, Pick up the damn phone!"
The trouble, of course, was that the phone had been...

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The farmer had just left, when the old woman paused scooping up the silver to ponder on his telling. "Blue eyes? Could have sworn they were brown."

She shrugged and lifted a loose board to join the fee with treasured cousins beneath the stair. A knock at the door left her breathless in the hurry to conceal her hoard.

"Who… who is it?" she wheezed. Rather than answer, the caller entered quickly and fell behind the door.

"It's about the eye drops." whispered the same maid as had visited before. "I'd put them in when the Mistress startled me. I...

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It was white. That was something that was abnormal about the entire situation. What was not something that one thought of when being beaten.

He wondered if perhaps it was heaven trying to tell him that he was closer than he though. He hoped that it was finally the light at the end of the tunnel, but when the next blow from the stick hit him across the back, he knew he had no such luck.

A small well of blood slowly came up his throat. It almost felt like a terrible hiccup to him. One of those hiccups that...

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Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. She hugged her shoulders and shivered in the form fitting dress. Too little cloth and too much cold collaborated to goose-pimple her flesh.

The man on the bed behind her called her back. She waited as long as she could before she knew he'd start complaining, and then she turned. He told her what to do. She did it. What choice did she have?

Later that evening, the Madam demanded the money she'd collected that evening. The girl pulled up the straps of her dress. "Yes,...

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Leonard stumbled back. He almost fell. His heart raced and sweat stuck his shirt to his belly and back and armpits. He'd had patients worse off than Bea, patients with bloody ends, with pointless existances, tortured creatures that lived and died hooked to electricity and strapped to beds. None with the relative safety and comforts that he'd been treating Bea in, the comfort of home.

This was a scheduled meeting in the garden, she'd come from the trees, barefoot, bare arms, makeup garishly applied and with the gauzy veil over her face. His boy would laugh, he imagined, would point...

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Waves. The sound was the first thing she noticed. She had to be somewhere near the ocean. She took a moment to register her immediate situation. Her right hand grasped a jutting piece of rock, and her left held tight to a thick branch that had somehow taken root in the cliff face. Her feet rested on a narrow ledge of rock that was no more than a few inches. She was thankful for her small feet, which her mother used to say were her best attribute.

She had to be at least 20 feet up. The ocean was too...

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She blew out the candles on her birthday cake, and the world we knew was extinguished. The next day, streamers and half-deflated balloons still taped to the walls and ceiling, Dad came home and pulled Mom into the kitchen and they spoke in whispers.
Jenny looked at me and snuck up to the television and turned down the volume, so we could hear was they were saying, but Mom knew and stuck her head in and told us to go down to Grandma's for the afternoon.
We walked down the block, turned right at the corner store, left after two...

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The clock had stopped.

The clock had stopped at two minutes past eleven, but whether that was eleven this morning, last night, or three weeks ago, he wasn't sure. He rarely looked at the clock - it was just something that was there, on the wall, taking up space. Something that he would, no doubt, miss were it ever to be gone, but, because of the sameness of it, because of the reliability of its general shape being where it always was, it went unnoticed.

It was only the fly that was buzzing annoyingly around the room that caused him,...

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"can you get my squeaky toy for me?"
"OK. where is it?"
"under the couch"
"OK...geez Pancakes...how many toys can you fit under here?"
"i dunno how many are there?"
"Six!"
"well then...six i guess."

And thus began the story of Tall Guy and Zeke Andrew Pancakes.

It started out as a bit of a joke I suppose. I opened a Facebook account and a Twitter account for my dog Zeke. I posted semi-regular interactions between him and I, and much to my surprise everybody played along without even being asked. Everybody treats Zeke as a separate entity and never...

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