1770 3 3
|
Waking in the middle of the night, tangled in the hotel sheets, I wanted to hear the story again: their pilot friend, the war, his specialty. "It's just a screw, son," Dad said, "nothing exotic."
|
177000
|
Black tagliatelle with squid and funghi porcini. He didn't understand why they called it a special, it had been in the menu since day one they had opened.
|
177031
|
We learned to dance beneath a gazebo / in Spring Lake Park / We were fourteen
|
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.
|
177054
|
Their love was doomed at the onset, yet they engaged in it anyway, heedless of the numerous error messages and critical runtime failures. Abort, Retry, Fail? They selected Retry over and over.
|
177044
|
... if they called her Mother, would she take them home and raise them?
|
177052
|
I considered explaining that the universe is still evolving and changing, but the look on her face said GENESIS ONE.
|
177094
|
I didn’t have toothpicks. You looked at me as if it summed up everything about me.
|
1769164
|
He ran his forefinger round the rim of the lid then sucked at his fingertip. The texture's like chalk, he thought, it tastes of earth. He hadn't anticipated this — but dipped his finger in again and swallowed. It was like scraping his tongue against a blackboard on…
|
1769114
|
Mounds of earth and grassless ground
|
17691010
|
Yellow Pages season is on us now, and Jimmy's drivin' a contract route. He'll head out to the San Joaquin where they print, and load ‘em in the back of his Tundra with the high side walls until the whole damned rig sags low,
|
1769107
|
She can never say why, but guilt rides her bones
like the spirit. She rubs worry raw.
|
176900
|
an ominous figure of fear and grace a ball moves back and forth
|
176954
|
|
17681617
|
If I wanted cautious I wouldn't be in her bed. She would only sleep with her husband. Adultery is not for pussies. So I dive back into the conversation which has made my dick limp and ask where I'm wrong in our post-coital chatter and she says it doesn't
|
176822
|
I flung the basketball at the hoop and Cooper shagged the ball. He was the luckiest bastard I knew. ...
|
1768119
|
Your precious feet were there once, pressed against the familiar floorboards, where your poems suddenly appeared to you, flashing like lightning. I wonder which window they came in? Here's a thought: you were like that window. You caught…
|
1768910
|
When we were seventeen, after her dad, the preacher, finished his Sunday night church services that required our mandatory attendance, we'd walk to my car in the pasture-turned parking lot holding hands and stop at the passenger-side car door to kiss deeply, get…
|
176842
|
While I was still new at Black & Twigg, shortly before Thanksgiving, Percy brought me a handwritten memo to type, the subject “Turkey Hunt,” addressed to all Black & Twigg employees in the San Francisco office from management. It said that the firm…
|
176885
|
It was the first time I had ever seen a possession.
|
176888
|
dicks, skulls and upside down crosses
|
1768119
|
He asked me to bury him in Vegas.
Instead, I had him cremated in Trenton.
|
176832
|
There's still a swatch of jelly on his lower lip. Did you notice? That's not the way it's done, even on the tractor.
|
176800
|
Poppy de Witte was content to spend her summers in Cape Cod, where her family owned a small beach house considerably less stifling than their spacious apartment on Park Avenue.
|
1768145
|
She's the one you remember when there's talk of the blow.
|
176821
|
I can still feel the texture of those humid Delta mornings, hear the rhythm of the voices of black children echoing down the halls. I still remember the sense of purpose that I had each day, knowing that this, here, mattered: a child’s education, their
|
176755
|
While the other kids blew bubbles, Maddy clung to my neck. She didn't cry or scream, and she held on loosely, not with the death grip some kids have. For five Wednesday afternoons, Maddy wrapped her pudgy arms over my shoulders and rested her bottom on m
|
1767129
|
His knife enters the Maui onion. He minces garlic and applies heat to pan and melts sweet cream butter and browns the garlic first and then he adds the onion and more heat, but it's time that will surely caramelize them. Salt and pepper and splashes of wine for the pan and…
|
176763
|
You took up residence on the dark side of things, a bolthole in a wind-flayed right angle of a tower block where pigeons and suicides tumbled blackly on the air currents. You set about drifting off from who you were on a tide of cheap whisky and bad poetry, graduating…
|
1767188
|
She’s there, in a tin, loosely wound
beneath sepia tissue paper, a braid
to worry in your fingers.
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