2435 8 6
|
Shakespeare was Shakespeare, after all, the greatest poet the language has ever boasted: why did Shakespeare’s contemporaries even bother with their paltry efforts?
|
24352421
|
These days, even God has a day job.
|
2435146
|
I wear a white dress.
I vomit on hers.
|
24352016
|
We borrow a flag from a neighbor. It’s sitting on top of the TV in the den. We haven’t figured out where to display it yet.
|
243500
|
The lead man, who did not seem to be the most important or distinguished, just the one walking in line before all of the others, knocked twice on the door and opened it quickly. He stepped gingerly through the doorway and the others filed gloomily in afte
|
24331613
|
Confused, I paused and locked eyes with the girl who’d just bounced it with the long, dark hair. “I just saw you with it.”
She stared back at me. “Do you see it in my hands now?”
|
243386
|
I was in the kitchen peeling onions. They stung my eyes, and perhaps I was crying. I heard my dear husband run into the room and turned with the knife in my hand.
|
243399
|
Matilda went wild at sixty-five. Legs left unshaven for the first time in fifty years, hair still and proud, knotted with forgetting. She’d roam the streets at night, a traveler without design. Matilda was a gardener of sorts, digging up all previous assu
|
24332611
|
...there is something quite delicious about the air between people strange to each other, something that makes my skin crackle alive with the possibility of touch...
|
24331713
|
We were to eat just meat and to become discombobulated over vegetables and bread and not to indulge in sex with strange men—men were all strange once you got used to their distance—were Lincoln logs, poles, boulders and scrub trees.
|
243351
|
Your tongue is enlarging... wait, it’s growing hair. No, wait, it’s planarian flatworms, an earthy taste oozing down your throat. A terrible itching spreads from your solar plexus, under your skin everywhere. You know if you scratch even once, you won
|
243277
|
on the far shore, in the vineyards
timed charges explode like the sun catching on fire
it scares crows away from the grapes
|
243264
|
Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison—right now that’s all I can say.
|
24304426
|
Del and I watched my brother toe his way to the edge of the cottonwood branch that arched over the reservoir.
|
242921
|
Simon Ridley only had one special power. Whenever he walked into a room, an awkward silence would descend.
|
24291511
|
He gathers our abusive fathers, our esophageal tears, our peanut fetuses.
|
242863
|
when the devil dies he divides enough evil for everybody
|
242765
|
How much more attuned he was when surrounded by forest, consigning meaning to each tiny sound.
|
242700
|
“Ah, there’s the Tasmanian tiger,” the visitor says in an American accent, maybe midwestern. “It’s called a ‘thyracine,’ right?”
“Thylacine, yes.”
“Un huh. Thylacine. Extinct now, isn’t it?”
“Oh! Let’s hope not
|
24262626
|
Hers is the kind of crazy that can't be masked. She's worn it on her sleeves since tenth grade.
|
2425209
|
When he turns around she has her top off and is climbing out of her skirt. "I don't like old men that much," she says. "We don't have to talk. No one will know."
|
242500
|
Virginia hated herself for every moment she spent wondering what it would have been like if things had been different. How would her life be if Glen hadn’t been misdiagnosed, if he hadn’t died when she was a year married and four months pregnant? Not
|
242451
|
She comes and goes,gingerly at times, or, caution tossed,a headlong rushof foam and froth.No matter, I am steadfast,keen to be immersed once morein her salty splendor.
|
242400
|
The water burst into droplets of rain and fell on top of her. Chisame laughed out loud, a joy that overwhelmed her as she repeated this feat over and over.
|
242343
|
|
24233218
|
“Spare change?” he asked the couple heading into the cineplex. They glanced at his brother, saw something was wrong with him, then at him, noting his dirty and disheveled state. They passed without a word, not even a head-shake.
|
242360
|
|
24201613
|
I shuddered. This is how we are chosen
by strange and silent hands.
|
24203621
|
The young boy picks up a coin that has rolled to his feet. It is warm, too warm considering the cold air streaming around him.
|
24201511
|
The sky was an over-bleached sheet, stretched to the point of ripping. Everything worn but clean. He was saying he'd be happier if we lived in Canada. The sun seemed very close, like a star at the top of a Christmas tree. Maybe I could pull it down. Our baby had…
|
