2154 13 13
|
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…
|
215354
|
Often we sit in silence and age. We are observers of dust, fashioning ourselves into antiques.
|
21531611
|
He runs a mail-order business from a storefront and distributes a catalog of disappeared things.
|
215311
|
“They picked me up in their spaceship about noon,” Austin Grantham says to me while pulling up an apple crate to use as a stool.
|
2153128
|
She was a beautiful woman. I don't argue with that. I welcome it.
|
215300
|
The number 25 double-decker bus threads its way through the narrow two-lane streets. Coughing and burping without a hint of embarrassment, it carries us from the train station, with its cheerful round clockface and neat front of red brick, over the weepin
|
215311
|
It broke through the surface of the suburban world and shattered it into pieces, fragments of dreams and amazement. She was not the same as she had been a moment before. It was an epiphany she couldn't put her finger on.
|
2153128
|
Two-way conversation with God.
|
215396
|
He was the kind of man that I would rather have declawed than date, and then leave him on a gurney, helpless and anaesthetized. Cliff Eames had made me feel that way since we were teenagers. He would never be helpless. …
|
215382
|
Later that night, he lay his shivering children in his own bed, the bed that betrayed and abandoned him just a few years ago. It will protect them now.
|
215210
|
It's dawn. It's quiet on the pond in the Public Garden. The light is calm, the pollution is mild, and everything is still,except for the occasional cruising taxi. It's the beginning of spring-- tulips out, leaves…
|
21521013
|
pluck me from the charred grate
|
215287
|
Megan beat up on herself later over the unsaid.
|
215263
|
Doc and I talked for several hours. When I told him Mona was pregnant, he turned his head and looked at me. “Who's the father?” he asked. Don't know, I said. Mona didn't know, either.
|
2152157
|
the boredom inherent in living in the suburbs
|
21521310
|
I need a different storage solution
|
215174
|
She began guiding Penny’s arms, whispering movements through her body. Memory and experience sang through every fiber of their being. The song had become her life.
|
215196
|
Okay, no freaking out. I mean, this isn't a suicide note. This is suicide fiction.
|
215111
|
A 1960’s of walking sugar beet fields to remove the rogue bolters by hand and on other days painting the ironwork of cattle sheds with red oxide. Then a 1970’s when the self-inking explosion of tattoos on his hands and then his body began.
|
2151199
|
I screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked him if he had shot down any Japanese airplanes. He grinned at me. “One,” he said.
|
21503013
|
I had felt suddenly lighter and next thing I knew I was watching Leonard Tucker and Sister William from somewhere near the ceiling. I saw myself, too, at my desk, holding my songbook out in front of me like everyone else.
|
215062
|
It’ll die in there and the stairwell’ll stink for weeks, Greg says in the car. We’re quiet, considering that.
|
215063
|
For some, a vertical pattern will evoke prison bars, for others, product bar codes.
|
21502016
|
Just bring me his head, that cerebral kiln of hot, ruddy verbiage and cadence.
|
215084
|
It calmed the guilt in my heart while kids reveled, laughed, and "made time" with the neighborhood girls on that final night of freedom.
No one would talk to those girls again.
|
215011
|
True love may last forever, but the most I've ever gotten out of a lab assistant is two years, five months, three weeks, twelve days, and fifteen hours. And he was the exception.
|
214995
|
I found my black dot nucleus. School got me in the 10th year with the numbers spilling outta my head, but now I got the cell on my mind. Everybody's floating around this joint all pink and green college clean, yellow face Japanese, or the jet-headed Greeks with their…
|
214900
|
At night, on these New England roads, there is no light, no pink sodium-vapor glow, no guideposts.
|
214910
|
Danica saw her hand with the ring lifted up by Oryn. Both of their eyes locked onto the red gem and Danica understood what Oryn offered.
|
214831
|
I have never met Joe’s brother, of course.
|
