Every year, they arrived overnight—hulking beasts of steel, purring in anticipation under the harvest moon. Their shoulders jutted over the trees.
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I wasn’t expected to live long. Born in the shadow of a great war, it was casually assumed I would perish in the next.
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The sky had slipped from bold in its blueness to a softer pastel, its pink-tinged glow reflected in the limpid sea. The local fishermen were busy at the far end ...
I didn’t even hear him come in. Just walked into the kitchen and found him sitting splay-legged at the table, cleaning his nails with a tiger claw threaded onto a ...
She didn’t like the way he was staring: that bald, red-nosed old ‘gentleman’ in the tweed waistcoat. Respectable as you like, but for the hawkish look on his face. It ...
Orla started seeing Dan in secret. Hotel afternoons. Dan the man, was well off. Orla, not so much poor as unpractised in the pleasure of spending money, luxuriated.
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Amelia lies back against the cool cotton, splaying hands like white spindles.
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I wanted to tell her all of this, but when I tried to speak I had no answer for the gorilla. Instead I let my mind wander until I settled ...
Leo wished he could tell his son how sometimes a thing like love can hurt too much, how it is like a string that vibrates, creating sound.
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The pitiful creature has been caught in a net of his own design. See how he struggles and gets more tangled up. It’s too much for my delicate sensibilities: so ...
“It shouldn’t be exposed like this,” she’d whisper. “We’re supposed to be ignorant. It works best that way.”
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It is a little stunted, and the kernels are not always plumped out like fresh pillows, but it does well enough as bulk cattle feed, pellet chicken feed.
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Now disheveled like an old beauty in her tattered dressing gown. Gravel disorderly mixed with dirt, gnawed hedges.
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We also watched scorpions making their determined way on the sand or across the road, and in the evening, we walked with our heads bent towards the ground, so we ...
On the day we met, you wore an oversized poncho with dungarees and yellow, rubber boots.
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He had warned us. This wouldn’t be your travel agent’s Mexico, no rent-a-moped-and-go-out-for-margaritas vacation.
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She did not know how to drive. That is what her sons said after the fact, but this did not stop her from driving the priest’s jeep through the flimsy ...
When my mother burned the bife acebolado, she blamed it on the magical prankster Saci.
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The air-conditioned shuttle jerked through traffic on overbuilt thoroughfares into a safe, pathetically normal tourist Mecca.
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I wasn’t scared as I felt the world tipping, carrying me tightly at its side. I heard the splash, the cool water wrapping itself around me, and then the muffled ...