2762 15 8
|
The goddamn artist. This was her fourth inquiry, first visit. Her eyes fluttered shut as she leaned against the cold porcelain.
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27612818
|
After my father moved in with his girlfriend, my mother sold the split-level and rented a two-bedroom in an apartment complex rife with divorced mothers and the under-employed.
|
276023
|
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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27562220
|
We were always thrilled that the moon worked the night shift. In high school, often bored with the two drive-in movies, we'd sometimes go to tent revivals on our dates and get healed or get saved depending upon what that “tent-housed”…
|
275611
|
The summer of 1974, between high school and college, I got my first real job, paid corporate employment. My mother couldn't stand having me underfoot, sitting around all day, watching TV. She drove me in the family station wagon to a temporary secretarial agency. I told…
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27552519
|
We were the same and different. I was wild, wild, and she was calm. A pair of dolls we were. Holding hands in thin white dresses. Running through fields. Spying on boys. Making small things from grass and weed and wildflower. One day (it was a Tuesday) al
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275523
|
My wife is an angel.
When I was a kid, that’s what we believed dead people were. Sitting on a cloud with a halo and a harp. We learned it from cartoons, but I think I’ve heard angels are supposed to be their own order, like
|
27541812
|
She looked up, blinked. Fuck are you? I shook my head. Nobody you’ll remember, I said.
|
275421
|
“We should go again,” said Krishna.
But Iqbal didn’t reply. He sipped his tea like he hadn’t heard, but a tremor passed through his right shoulder. His left arm was bandaged, and the wrist and lower arm were in a c
|
275352
|
Her eyes were brown. But he wasn’t sure. He looked again: her eyes were blue. Her eyes were blue, and looking straight at him.
|
27523719
|
It had been so long since the telephone had rung, he’d forgotten the sound.
|
27501411
|
“When he felt most loved, he felt most _ burdened.” Stephen Dobyns When she loved him she burdened him. She knew he felt a pull but he always resisted it. They went to an old refurbished hotel in Venice and asked if they might see the rooms. …
|
2749132
|
They stumble and curse prettily, their thin arms traversed with colored lines of drainage from the swooping trays, snakes of pricey liquor tinkling down their armpits and disappearing into unwashed bras packed with soggy filler.
|
274631
|
TEXT TO VICKY
This sucks! Sorry for the teen-speak Vicky, but it does. You saw me in the hospital. It's just as bad at home. They still don't know what to do for my smashed voice box. I probably won't ever speak again. (Maybe with a mechanical thing lik
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27463617
|
Eat slowly. Wait. Do not bring reading material. Do not bring headphones. Avoid distractions.
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274552
|
Don Galt’s butterflies swallowed Peter Robinson’s holdings on a cool and cloudy December afternoon.
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27451510
|
Of only there were more like you,
I wouldn't be changing careers.
And my drawings would still be in magazines,
instead of on strange people's rears.
|
27432213
|
When you live in New Orleans, the only time you ever get to see cows is at the Winn-Dixie 24 Hour Super Store, in the back between the dairy and the seafood.
|
274276
|
Soon the entire sky load of constellations
was carried across the bumpy fields
|
274174
|
“In retrospect, perhaps I should ask my renter’s insurance to cover damage from lava lamp discharges. But I am not a person who enjoys a fracas.”
|
27412217
|
Mama reads about UFOs in paperback books and newspapers with big cloudy pictures. Her girlfriends know about flying saucers, too. They get drunk at night when they are sitting all alone in their living rooms because they are divorced or married to men who
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274072
|
I was seeking punishment so I put my lips around a bright green persimmon and bit down, the bitterness of its flesh overcame me...
|
27341110
|
‘Last week,’ I said, ‘on the radio, there was a competition. The DJ played a sound-bite of a car going over a cattle grid, and people had to phone in to guess which cattle grid it was. I didn’t phone in, but I knew the answer.’
|
2733137
|
It will be a beautiful, luminous, rollicking, transcendent book, the manuscript smudged with tomato sauce and tears.
|
273231
|
In the night, a several-hundred-pound Black Bear scaled our neighbor’s back fence, bounded down the gravel footpath between our houses and, confused by the people and lights, followed his instincts up a large pine tree across the street...
|
27312018
|
The doctor told me:
"You have 24 hours
to live.
no more, no less."
|
27283019
|
I went for a walk to buy coffee, here's what I saw
|
27282115
|
The dog is there, on sorry legs, with sorry claws. He looks toward the man, the bat, and says, You know me, Man. I know you know me.
|
272877
|
My father-in-law is drunk. This is something only my husband and I know: the old man does not stagger or flail, he is not vacant; neither too-friendly nor hostile to the woman who shows us to a table and sets down three bundles of silverware wrapped in paper…
|
27272010
|
We construct a paper bridge. The droid walks across it. We follow, one after another, like sentences in a story.
|
