21731312
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We were on the L train.You were reading Fifty Shades of Gray;I was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. You never looked up until just as I moved off, always looking back your way and hopingyou would lift your head. And then you did, at the last moment,but…
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2173309
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21712121
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So there are these teenagers and they're all dying of cancer, or at least were dying of cancer, or might be dying of cancer, and then a couple of them fall in love and lose their virginity to each other, and these teens, they're all smart and charming and only a little…
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2170178
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“You don't know what it's like, to be an old man, to be alone man, behind blue eyes,” he said to the downtown city sidewalk. The sidewalk said nothing. People with someplace to go rushed by him, not stopping.
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216920
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Blood smeared in the hugging choke of her courtier. Our only recourse is to confront life with the benefits of a choke. “Please, don't make me force you.” Should misery be a reassurance when love is destroyed? There are reasons: “My wife doesn't live with
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216744
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I hear all the static in her head, all the fuzzy threads from half a mile away. She hates dirt. She hates the couples who come in and talk stupid lies at each other. It's so simple with her. I ask what she likes. The feeling of soft wool on her bare nippl
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21662913
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My round belly is deflating. I disappear a little more by the day. It's been weeks. Soon, I may not even be here.
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2164116
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She got the day wrong. It was one of her usual mistakes, getting the day wrong. A Wednes for a Tues. Or a 5th for a 6th. Sometimes it took her until afternoon to realize it. Which probably meant that it didn’t make much of a difference anyway.
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216341
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As I sat down finally, finally to write,
some brooding heretical hour of the night, with my ballpoint in hand, poised to blot page, Time gathered momentum, although I did not age...
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21603210
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At the bar, she told me her name was Natasha, but she doesn’t look like one. She’s too thin and flighty for one thing. And all Natashas have a Russian accent and talk of the Motherland as if it were never cold and before it turned to borderlines and j
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215878
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Momentarily Winston’s thoughts muddled again. He felt his fingers twitch, a physical sensation which seemed to accompany any recollection from the past. Most of his memories were moments he’d reiterated so many times during his stay in the Ministry of Lov
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21581812
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She looked up, blinked. Fuck are you? I shook my head. Nobody you’ll remember, I said.
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21574013
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I should have created a first-date questionnaire heartaches ago.
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215740
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Mrs. Bigelow loaned Tessa a black tulle maid’s uniform and helped her pin it in at the sides. She tied on Tessa the stiff white apron. Slippery, pale, opaque stockings of real silk oozed through the girl’s fingers, secured by a heavy satin garter belt
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215664
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Les petites collines de ma cousine Vous savez, ma mère a eu peur du fait que je ne résiste plus. Elle avait mille fois raison : Mes quatre sœurs ont toutes rendu l'âme avant que…
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215542
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Six clocks are brought to a tool shed, behind the house (three black, two white, and one red.)
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21553617
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Eat slowly. Wait. Do not bring reading material. Do not bring headphones. Avoid distractions.
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2155106
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My brother and I had often debated whether we could get our father to shave his moustache off, just to see if his sophistication remained intact without it.
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21542116
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The afternoon my little sister won her first U.S. Open, I was also busy, having strenuous sex with David Solemn, a man I’d met earlier that morning at Dunkin Donuts. We did it on the white living room carpet in my parent’s new Connecticut house while
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2150179
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So where was I? On the curb, the stingy, gritty curb of existence, hard on the ass, as usual on the rim of it all, the ledge of success, well to tell the truth far from the ledge but about to fall off, floating on the circumference of meaning, riding a c
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215030
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keep your fiberwigs in check
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214823
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The receiving line stretched into the lobby of the funeral home, which was decorated with faded Waverly wallpaper, dirty lemon yellow carpeting, and the kind of ornate white furniture I used to want in my bedroom when I was a little girl. The people in th
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21471911
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My handwriting, slow in coming over many years, is good for lists, but I don't want to read sentences or write in it. Amber is on a list I wrote of things I want to remember of Russia: Rasputin's death and Peter the Great (6'7”). One of my lists I read as a poem in…
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21462317
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In the 15 years that I've worked at my local public library, I've learned that we librarians do plenty of things for our patrons that aren't in our job descriptions. After a patron asked me to change her flat tire, and another wanted to check out our pencil sharpener,…
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21462521
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“Your sister is a slut,” said Ma to me over supper.
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214631
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When Igor stepped inside the capsule, he had two thoughts: the cramped tin can would either become his victory chariot, or his funeral casket.
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21423019
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That spring the war still moved north but we did not go to it any longer.
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21423814
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214111
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I saw your soul like flesh through négligée,
enigma moulding treasure from okay.
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21393719
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There's a story of you who says to go on, to walk the room, to pretend to contemplate. Promises that if you lift your hand your head will follow. Assures you when your bones reignite there will be day, there will be night, and you'll know which is which. Don't worry about…
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