96570
|
Jessica's face was so close to mine I had to focus on her left eyeball to keep my eyes from crossing.
|
32175
|
|
123376
|
“Now we lay you in your grave
There was no way you could be saved
You hate our lord Jesus and he can tell
Which is why you will burn in hell.”
|
172275
|
You worry that the mullahs suspect us, but that cannot be. We never touch in public. You weep and I shake when a neighbor knocks on the door.
|
130675
|
What's the weirdest thing you've ever used as a bookmark? I work in a library. I've seen that, and more.
|
151375
|
A secret search rolled from Odette's eyes. A gulch split her down the middle and she had the world believing this was the way she liked it. Odette was a woman who spent entire days bending backward within herself, never letting on that she was…
|
89876
|
we feel entitled to, so unwanted, afraid for, from the billions of stomping oafs, leaping onto our hearts like squishing jelly sandwiches for fun, bullies in power out there? To be brilliant onits tiny behalf? I forget, exactly whyare you still here anyway? Don't…
|
140377
|
My wife and I were looking for a "fixer-upper." We were strange that way. We were leaving a rental which had cat tunnels built into the walls. One villa we toured had a heartbeat. In the basement, in place of a well pump, was a heart made of fibrous roots which had…
|
127171
|
Jacob Obrecht, you are beautiful. Everything inside your head and everything you’ve ever made is beautiful and singing.
|
119271
|
Things don't always go to plan. Gem knew what people would have said back then, of course. She wasn't stupid.
|
145674
|
The things we do for books, she thought.
|
121677
|
yet fiction, despite contrary reports, from two ends of the American spectrum, does not mean lies, in my HUM
|
130975
|
I bleed my heart into my computer, peruse The fact they have proclaimed my root unfit for use But it is I! This manhood, this tower Extending up toward the heavens like a miraculous flower, Purple headed warrior of generation, See it standing…
|
99074
|
...something in her raw vulnerability and daring beauty drove these men wild...
|
121377
|
I can barely pick out the numbers on the houses
|
119977
|
I wondered if Mr. Slane even knew/
how many dogs he owned
|
143075
|
skies electric blue,/limpid dewy air, the world/framed by a small farm.
|
158272
|
He had long since quit listening to the incessant clanging of the bell. He stood, ringing the bell, squinting into the setting sun, nauseous from the car exhaust, his body aching for alcohol.
|
138572
|
In the kitchen they discovered the instruments. A flute under the sink tucked behind a rusted silver pipe. An oboe on the floor in the pantry. And a violin across the ice tray in the freezer, now dark.
"Not ice," sister said, holding it up by the neck.
|
94975
|
I don't think I minded so much watching the trucks hit him, one breaking his spine with a decisive snap, and the other finishing the job by splitting his skull. I don't think I minded watching as much as I did watching those two boys poking around at his
|
50774
|
...Or perhaps it has; It depends which way you look at it. Perhaps the reader may cite laziness As my reason for not titling this Any other than I would have done As now, with such a title As it has, since for some reason I never…
|
41974
|
|
126772
|
The ice in my drink provides ample cooling. The brew strength of my tea is just such that it combines in a pleasing fashion with the melting ice. My mind is clear and my belly absent hunger. I am completely sated from any physical desire at this very mome
|
96475
|
|
119271
|
Emma Louise is walking over a concrete bridge when she spies, out of the corner of her eye, a man fishing, waist deep, in the river tumbling below. She is thinking that the water must be very cold on this autumn day, when she sees an extraordinary thing.
|
192178
|
We watched kids tweeze snapping turtles out of the park grass. They dropped them into a styrophoam cup and called it the snap turtle home. When they grow up they will bite your arms off, their father said laughing.
|
133175
|
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God. What on Earth does that mean? What the hell? Earth, hell, heaven, they were good concepts. He took a rib out of Adam and began to write with it.
|
132875
|
I am standing in the kitchen, kneading dough, because this is one way to say sorry. This is way to say, things will be different now, look.
|
131878
|
“You should've let him drown,” she once told me. Doesn't she see that I did? I'll let her drown, too.
|
126275
|
The receipts all fell into the black leather valise he’d retrieved from storage that afternoon, except for the forty-eight cents, which wound up in the right front pocket of his jeans.
|