2039 14 15
|
There he was, naked and covered in green mud
|
2039129
|
“Lightning has more longevity than I,”
|
203952
|
Jimmy wore a tie to top that torn green tee he toted every day, every other. He smelled of dirt, said he had a feeling we had watermelon somewhere since he caught a whiff from his room inside his house across the street.
|
203954
|
Her pudgy face, flour-coated and sugary and so life-nurturing in the past, had a different spark now, a searching look I’d seen as soon as she opened the door.
|
203900
|
I laid in the road, broken and alone, until I had no choice but to pull myself together and get out.
|
20391312
|
But by day the birds / of prey were in control.
|
20392214
|
The night we crossed the Madres my father stuffed his Stetson full of cash.
|
203900
|
Incredibly he began to picture in his mind a scene not related at all to his frenzied search but of a huge plate of apple pie a la mode with the vanilla ice cream melting in streams like cool lava down the side of the pie and off of the plate.
|
20381713
|
No fear of that, / he assured her,
|
20381814
|
it corrupts the smells//
and flavors of the world/
and plants its swollen face
|
203874
|
Juniper Mélange was a cat person, not a dog person. Truly detested when she perceived falseness in another person. She wore glasses and drank tea. Had dark straight hair and light skin. She dressed conservatively and would watch the sky most days. She wou
|
20382215
|
The river’s not/
a river but/
a FEMA map/
of flooding probabilities.
|
2038102
|
I never pulled it off, never rode an atom through a super collider with a nose full of cocaine and a drink in my hand. Never was a bullet, zooming through the city, skin pressed to bone, nerves on fire. Never was an atom bomb, ever-exploding in slow motion, ripping off…
|
203842
|
The dogs shit on the roof and then, every two weeks or so, the man in Apartment 311 climbs out the window with a plastic shovel and scoops the shit into a white plastic bag, which soon grows heavy with dung, dangling from his black-gloved wrist.
|
203832
|
your olive-pitting thumbs
|
203810
|
The schedule fell smoothly into place: After Imogene went home at the end of the day, Calvin locked the office door, then he and Rosalie marched into the examination room and she flossed him.
|
2037134
|
. . . she didn’t bow her head.
|
203754
|
You know how it is, one day a good friend sends you this long note telling you how-the-hell they are or aren't getting along in the frigging world
|
203762
|
The figure was covered in a light blue chenille bathrobe, splayed out on her back on the floor by the glass door, her hair done up in large curlers, a slipper lying askew by her left foot. Richie crouched near the face and the rancid flame of bourbon lea
|
203761
|
Bit by bit I was traveling away, we thought. Maybe I’d join myself, all together, in Toronto. Or in an industrial coffee can. Or in the closet. “Check the closet,” I pointed.
|
203742
|
All right, so the frog I risked my lips on (not to mention the contents of my stomach) . . . .
|
203655
|
He has one good eye and is missing the other. The socket of his missing eye squints with a disturbing and unfathomable insight.
|
2036107
|
Things get lost in Big John, too. I see the other guys throw jokes about his size at his body that wedge their way into his armpits or into the wrinkles of his laugh lines and disappear. I’m not sure if it all disappears to remind us how small we are,
|
2036155
|
Megalomania is a kind of backwards leprosy. It rots your insides out while your skin glistens and grows tighter around your bones.
|
203684
|
“I don’t know what’s going on there,” Hank, who hated his name and wanted a more Biblical name because those names (Jeremiah! Matthew! David!)—although common—sound ominous, said as he pointed up to the top of the apartment building that housed the whores
|
20361311
|
I am constricted by rings. The weight of self crushes me.
|
203643
|
Grace Gibbons is a way of life.
|
203611
|
Whispers flew, like wild darts across the room. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. Right then, it wasn’t my job to figure things out; it was my job to cry.
|
203698
|
They sat on the couch, and he tried to unbutton her buttons, but she fended him off.
|
20361213
|
Papadad has one good eye. The other fell out during a rant and has since been replaced by a rifle scope, which he uses to scrutinise enemies.——Papadad is an authority on everything, even topics he has not researched. He expatiates on these at the dinner table,…
|
