Charles didn't know what to think. The heat on his cheeks hurt too much, but he didn't like it when the flame disappeared. Jenny was the one holding the camera. She told him that they could all share the candle. It was one flame for the entire group. A moppet party, dad called it, because it was not their birthday.

Mom was sick. Charles could only think of that. She'd pale cheeks and skin stretched over her face, and her hair tangled and black and her mouth a gaping, gawping hole. She didn't even recognize any of them when they'd...

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Well, I wasn't prepared for this. Genetic engineering really is only my minor. I majored in Music Education, and do a helluva good job at it, if I do say so myself.

The genetic engineering project was supposed to be more kid friendly. A cockatoo and a persian cat, gene spliced, to for some sort of mutated mix. The math (something I'm freely admitting to be poor at) implied more of a cat's head. I got the bird head. Must have not carried the three.

Anyway.

I'm going to have to raise it now. There's no getting out of that....

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"I object!"

The whole church turned and stared at the woman panting uncontrollably at the doors. Heather couldn't believe she actualy made it right on time. This type of thing only happened on T.V, or so she thought.

She moved steadily down the ilse, getting mixtures of confusion, anger and outright amusement gazes from the crowd. Of course, Paul would look confused. He stepped away from his bride, who could have melted the mesh of her veil from the looks she gave.

"Heather," Paul cleared his throat, looking around the huge crowd. "What the heck are you doing here?"

"Fighting,"...

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I carry you with me.
I carry you with me here.
Right here, in this tender spot
in this hollow space.
I carry you with me.
I carry you on the tip of my tongue
Just on the tip, so that I can
carry you with me here,
in my words, in my sounds
There. That word, that sound -
Said just as you would, just as you have
Because I carry you with me,
I carry you with me here.
Right here, in the downturn of these lips,
In that expression you wore had that carried with it a...

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Rudolph ran as fast as his four legs would carry him. He had run out of fairy dust over a remote forest, and unfortunately it was deer season.

The celebrity found it hard to blend in with his shiny nose. In fact, it was damn near impossible. His snoz glowed like a blinking beacon, one the hunting party was only too glad to follow. He heard a voice, not far off, call, “I see him over here, boys!”

Damnation, but they were close!

Rudolph searched the area. Could he pull the ol' mud over the nose trick again? No, who...

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The year was 1986. I was traveling through the American South with a spaniel I had picked up along the way who answered to the name "Kenneth".

My goal was to reach Little Rock, Arkansas in order to see the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library and Museum. Unfortunately, I had committed a great error and had greatly misjudged, as he would not even be elected for another six years.

Whoops.

While the spaniel who responded to the name "Kenneth" almost certainly knew that I was too early, he remained mute. In all the many weeks we spent together, he only...

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I jumped. I blacked out. When I awoke, head ringing and eyes spotted with colours, he turned round slowly.

"You ever heard of an Ox Bow Lake?"

"nuhuh" I said. Mind you, the gag would have rendered the same result as a Shakespeare soliloquy. 

"sahwiwochee" Hell, it was different. Maybe if you were a dentist, this conversation would be less one sided. I eyed the man who had broken in to the lab, wondering if he'd had orthodontist training. He knew his way round a physics lab alright, but fiddling with the quantum accelerator probably wasn't the best idea. That...

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I love you.

The last thing he told her before taking a drink from his soda, setting it down, taking a deep breath and then wandering straight into the traffic that killed him. Family legend says that he'd lost a lot at the tracks that afternoon and then on the final race, he'd won the mother load.

Happiness like that for a compulsive gambler can be too much. The take was huge but the win was too much and he went out on the highest of notes. Plastered to the front of a dump truck.
The newspaper clipping has it...

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1882 by Qner

When the father arrived home to his squalid, Lower East Side tenement building, he was exhausted. He paused at the door to pose for a Jacob Riis photo, and then trudged though the entryway. The grit of coal from the furnace in the oil refinery still covered his face. This, despite the fact that we worked on the docks hauling fish. His apartment was in the rear of the building: a cramped, filthy space overlooking a pile of rubbish that the realtor had described as a “quaint fixer-upper with a partial city view.” He approached the door, removed a rat...

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Potatoes.

That's all the six year old girl would eat. And it seemed that no matter what else I tried to serve her, potatoes was it. She wouldn't try anything else. Wouldn't look at anything else. All she ever wanted? Potatoes.

"Honey, what are we supposed to do?" I sighed, sliding into bed that night. "We went out to the Olive Garden. And she asked for potatoes!"

My husband chuckled a little. "Well, look on the bright side: at least it's a vegetable she wants. Could be worse."

"This is bad enough! No protein! No grain! Heck, even sugar would...

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