2116 8 4
|
He ate husks of bone and old paper scraps with yesterday's headlines, blowing down the street like tumbleweeds now at four o'clock in the morning.He wrapped himself in an old army coat against the November winds as he tramped back and forth, back and forth, up the ten…
|
21152216
|
My mother used to say she'll be just like you and you‘ll deserve it. I was a Punk Rocker. A rebel. Emily worries about things like grades and sports. She's on the soccer team. I got stoned under the bleachers. Emily, is a good kid. …
|
211501
|
I cannot remember what the celebration was for, but the baby was at its center. We passed him around, a sweet smiling boy about seven months old. The age when babies can sit but can't yet crawl and their thighs get plump.
|
21151313
|
He stays a couple of yards behind me as we slog uphill. I try to diffuse the tension with a coy toss of head, slip on wet leaves. My ankle rolls and I splat noisily down. From my new angle his beard looks less stylish—bristles straggle all up his neck. He maintains…
|
211498
|
Turns out it was you. But. You made it into the latest dumping ground in spite of their voted insults. In spite of being told you weren't even going to be around to be danced with. The loneliest girl now looks perfectly trim and trendy to all eyes.…
|
211472
|
There were a lot of advantages to having shoelaces.
|
211420
|
She spilled her neurons across the dissecting board of the violin, breathed deep and forced herself outward with every exhalation. Her molecules mixed with wax and horsehair, and her heart valves arched in unison.
|
211485
|
I could love them all, your people, /
Learn their differences, speak their tongues, /
When there is no one there to hold you /
But me, my arms would be wide enough /
To hold armies of your need. Do not forget.
|
21144722
|
Only strong personalities can endure such size, the weak ones are extinguished by it.
|
2114138
|
I had been in bed for a couple of days and by this I mean sleeping for fifteen or sixteen hours at a time. I don’t think that I believed in God anymore. I no longer knew how to stay awake.
|
2114119
|
They kiss, opening their mouths into a smile, sharing a secret. Their kiss is so intimate. I blush, and look away embarrassed and a little aroused.
|
211364
|
I put my arms around her and whisper to her while she plays the piano. She wiggles and tells me to stop it.
|
2113109
|
I hear the slightly scratched voice of Joan Baez coming from
the record player singing about the junipers in the pale moonlight,
applause erupting like hailstone on a corrugated iron roof.
I am singing back through the bedroom wall,
wishing the
|
21132618
|
sooner or later you realize
|
211375
|
Pow! I shoot him through his jelly donut.
|
21122713
|
This is not a story you expect to end at Cape Horn.
|
211211
|
you wear the warmth of death/
and your heat eternity/
blasts on mourn from your heart
|
211210
|
Before I was 18 years old, in my small home town of Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Canada, I invented the designer jean...
|
211200
|
Alysia slowed down for a moment. She clutched her head again. She looked up and found herself at a playground. There was a familiarity in the air.
|
211131
|
A canister of unused laughter taken from the mouth of a baby not yet born
A splinter of wood from a cross, perfectly preserved in dark tea
taken from the belly of a dead Irishman
A milky vial of smog taken from the air of Los Angeles circa 1965
A
|
211164
|
“I better go. My mom needs me at home,” she says. Soft. Smooth. Firm. Sweet. Maybe I’m pushing too hard. I kiss her on the cheek and she stiffens in response. My heart bleats.
|
211120
|
A black wind raced ahead of the Merbreth and Juko could smell the thing's fur, matted with the blood of men. The coppery scent mingled with the fear coming off the men around him, a fear so palpable it became a tangible thing, something to be tripped over
|
211186
|
Len and I sit on Harpo's porch, drink beer and gab. It's hot, even for July. Len and I joke and laugh, and Harpo stares off into the middle distance.
|
211098
|
my father has a phobia of dentists./ he also once felt/ that if the house ran out of toilet paper/ he would lose his job.
|
211061
|
Puberty, for Ellen, was less than an overnight event—yes, she got her period in a more or less timely fashion, but what her doctor referred to coolly as secondary sexual characteristics—namely, boobs—took their damned sweet time in coming.
|
2110178
|
I kiss his sunburned nose, so nice under the beach house. We hear the shower of palm leaves like wings getting ready. We talk about a time we'll no longer know each other, when he'll be sad in a bar in another state, slipping and sliding and petting lost dogs in the parking…
|
211022
|
There are worse things than getting your ass kicked by a 12 year old Puerto Rican kid. This was exactly my thinking as he stood over me, his pre-pubescent screams sounding like a baby Bruce Lee, preparing to finish me off.
|
210996
|
He told me he could feel an army of tears building up behind his eyes.
|
21091715
|
When you prime tobacco the old way . . .
|
210901
|
#1 MISCELLANEOUS NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
What kind of person would the author’s daughter, Gracie, become? That things didn’t look bright for her future was an understatement: Mother: alcoholic, dead at age 25 from puking her brains out; Father: m
|
