1771 8 5
|
For the next two hours, Ed goes nonchalantly about his business, buck naked the whole time. He putters around the house, writes e mails, waters plants, vacuums the rug and sweeps the porch. I pretend to ignore his nudity
|
1771129
|
Some time ago, I began to write you letters with the idea of helping your newspaper become a more complete map of our little shared world.
|
1771126
|
She bought her first gerbil at the age of nine. She wondered if he would die from endless logrolling. When he died from natural causes, she refused to bury him and kept a distance from the first boy who kissed her--Thomas J. Hobbit. The next year a twister swept…
|
177111
|
I hear the car door slam. Steve, about to duck daddy-duty: Just gonna take a run to the Quickway. "Rudy," I say, "go get in the car. Tell Papo I said Wait."
|
1771169
|
She was as distant as Mao, someone I never met, but whom everyone carried in their eyes,
|
17711816
|
We die in order to get some rest
|
177142
|
Why do men become explorers? he asked. Because they want to cannibalize the unknown; to leave the chemicals, the furniture (and, yes, the shrew) behind; to make their way hi ho into the brush, whose weeds and lianas remain empty of the exhortations of Jesus Christ, whose…
|
177186
|
"Love, against the dying of the light." (An unusual story about George Whitman, former owner of the revered & beloved Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, France.)
|
177100
|
Two women grab a table near a window in a coffee shop. Outside, the sky is the color of dulled aluminum. It is early spring and pollen assaults the air with a tint of sulfur.
|
1771128
|
On the usefulness of hands.
|
177073
|
He had an addiction to elevating himself to higher levels of potential: some would call this ambition.
|
177032
|
The Bird King suffers from phantom head syndrome. Ever since his decapitation by a critic, he has felt pain where his head used to be. Sometimes it wakes him in the night. It's so excruciating, he fumbles for a saw. But alas! there's nothing to chop off.He's seen every…
|
17701615
|
lost in a taxi cab, 4:30 am
|
177000
|
The place turns out to have a really nice ambiance, and while the pasta is only passable—though I ordered, I believe, the cheapest plate on the menu, so maybe I got what I deserved—the background dinner music playing is "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" by Wilco.
|
177051
|
One year, she got a kite.
|
17701614
|
fire rolls through
the drive-thru
|
1770135
|
Dad woke us up and said it was time to go.
|
177021
|
He had expected more -- at least his grandfather's classic Packard touring car.
|
177010
|
There were literally thousands of criteria that got people of every stripe and strata on the list, which had been maintained since before the very first human fingers scrawled crude images on blank surfaces.
|
177032
|
The ideas just came to them. "Nothing On" consisted of a television on a small stand, playing an endless loop of "Jersey Shore." "Shopping Bores Me" was a men's flannel shirt from American Apparel on an otherwise empty rack.
|
176961
|
Bearing the smell of paper on her fingertips. Ink in her hair.
|
176911
|
“They picked me up in their spaceship about noon,” Austin Grantham says to me while pulling up an apple crate to use as a stool.
|
17691110
|
Slip me in Between the cracks in your schedule Between the sheets of your bed Between your memories and your fears Between your eyes and the moon where I'll twinkle at you Slip me in somewhere, I won't disturb you Won't make you want to push me away Let…
|
176900
|
It’s confusing enough to grow up in a place like America, a country without definitive culture, except for ranch dressing and reality TV, but it’s even worse to grow up half one thing, half another, christened a hyphenation of names without connection to
|
176973
|
Roanne banged the chiva, turned tricks, and ran out of road.
|
17682614
|
After each piece cancelled the other
the generals folded up their checkerboards,
|
1768129
|
in which creative destruction holds the heads of entire populations beneath the surface of the water in bathtubs until the bubbles stop
|
1768103
|
He wanted me to learn the business, to become the son he always wanted but never had. I eagerly complied.
|
176855
|
Called in sick at work for a week straight when I first met Tony.
|
176874
|
The things we do for books, she thought.
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