Tag: Pennsylvania
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a loner in isolation
I don’t keep anything in my pockets. That was the first thing I noticed, gosh, back when I still had to move my car. My chapstick and pens sit on the desk and my car stays put except for weekly street sweeping (though I don’t hear them come by so don’t think I even need…
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No One Makes Money at Landlocked Bars on Holiday Weekends
If I only knew the time, he thought, I would know it all. Standing behind the bar on a slow holiday weekend he would wax philosophical. Something outside would catch his eye and the thought would skip away. Like how the awning of the place retracted with one of those poles you slipped through a…
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Gas Money, Honey
Eastern Pennsylvanians love their hoagies. I’d pulled into a gas station after driving six hours north. The place advertised 2 for 1 liters of cola and state minimum cigarette prices. A ‘70s style goose sweeping across a setting sun illuminated above their door. Mosquitoes flocked to its luminance. I parked the car in the rear…
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Running Home
Emma was in Boston the last time she’d ventured out for a jog. It had rained that morning and the puddles lay like landmines along her sidewalk-to-pond-and-back circuit. The mud splashed up to her ankles and had caked thickly on the laces of her running shoes. Now, in the living room of her parents’ Pennsylvanian…
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Knee-high by the Fourth of July
On the opposite side of the road passed the third pickup he’d seen that afternoon donning an oversized American flag waving in the blackened air behind the cab’s smokestack exhaust pipes. Patriotism, he thought as stomach acid warmed his chest, muddied and misled. The giant flag, strung from a 4’’X4’’ wooden post, flapped in animated…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 