The darn woodchuck was bothering me. He was a smart woodchuck. He had a bucket of red paint, which he was using to paint the golf course. "Ha ha ha," laughed the woodchuck. "I am painting this blade of grass right now. Watch as my paintbrush, which is laden in red paint, strokes the blade. See? It is red now. Ahahahaha!!!!!"

I was having none of it. I do not like the golf courses to be red, especially the green, which is called a green for a reason. You don't call them red or blues or yellows, do you? No....

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In the beginning, he tasted like rainwater: salty. Dried sweat around the rim of his mouth, a taste that clung to his mustache bristles like saltwater taffy.

In the beginning, he was rainwater, and I was a pool. Splashes hit the bottom. He said, you are a the ruin of mankind, rising to the tops of the trees. He said, you make me greedy to reach your destination like a home.

In the end, he tasted like a mountain top. Stretching high above the clouds to breathe a privileged cold. And I was a seed that could not grown on...

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Poorly written!

So many misspellings!

Dis-jointed and non-sensical!

Your story did not make me cry or remember the way my mother's wrist smelled when she buttoned the top button of my new short sleeve plaid shirt from JC Penney's one spring day in 1978 when 5th grade was beginning to feel long in the tooth .

Also, run on sentences! More of them, please.

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Fate always gets the last laugh.

You expect one thing, another happens. You predict a storm, there's not a cloud in the sky. You bet on red, the ball lands on black.

Or worse, double-zero. Salt in the wound.

I hated it. Predictions, prognostications, fortunes even, for those inclined to call it that... they're supposed to be real. I always believed in that little bit of the supernatural, some little psionic impulse, letting you see fate, visualize fate, and perhaps even manipulate fate.

Only I could never get it right. Nothing ever rang true, even when I deliberately predicted the...

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The lamp wouldn't turn on. That was really the least of his problems. It meant the electricity had finally been turned off. So had the water, the cable, and the gas. At least they had waited until the spring. It was warm enough to not risk freezing that night.

Jacob wondered through his house, filled with useless possessions. He touched the television and the fridge as he walked by them, exiting the house and into the beautiful April morning.

The birds were chirping and a steady drone of cars racing down the highway filled his ears. He took a deep...

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I read the note that proves nothing except by its very existence.

Details.

I caught the thrill in your eye when the first tear fell.

Details.

I could never report you but nine out of ten questions, I answered correctly.

Details.

You're right, I suppose, that you never hit me.

Details.

Broke your pinkie moving a couch, eh? Left because she was a bitch? It always goes the same but it's never, ever your fault?

Details, details, details.

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A life of dots was all she'd known. At first it was the small dots that appeared in the corners of her vision on sunny days. Then those dots went away as the days grew dimmer.

The next dots were the tablets the doctors gave her to "slow the loss of function."

And ever since then, dots touching fingertips, bringing meaning, sometimes memory.

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Chuntao was an anxious young girl, short and dumpy, who for money spent her mornings delivering leaflets advertising pizza to households in her part of Beijing. (For no money she spent her evenings playing the trombone.) It was a tedious and tiring job, and time would drag. One rainy day she reached the doorway of a house which perched at the top of an enormous stairway. Breathless and sweaty, she tripped on the doorstep and dropped her leaflets. As she bent down to gather them up, the door opened.
"Who are you and what do you want?" asked a man...

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The storm had blown over, but not before it had blown over his ship, along with all of his crew. The captain always went down with the ship, but by the time he woke up from a plank smacking him upside the head, he found himself drifting alone on a plank of wood in the middle of the ocean, no one else in sight. Too late to sacrifice himself to the sea gods now.

As he drifted, he knew shore was near. There were too many birds flying about for it not to be. He just had to hope the...

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, he assured the frightened convenience store clerk. The first thing was potato chips. He needed potato chips RIGHT NOW, he told her, or he would literally explode, because there were bombs strapped to him.

Don't worry about the bombs, he said again, trying to calm her down. But get me those potato chips quickly. I want the deep-fried sour cream-and-onion flavored type, he said, speaking slowly and enunciating so that there would be no screw-ups.

He had the advantage. She would be forced to retreat behind the counter, retrieve the bag of succulent potato chips that he knew she...

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