2160 30 13
|
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.
|
216033
|
salmon
maple syrup
horseradish
smoke detector
the list read, scrawled in purple marker on the refrigerator door.
|
2160104
|
Ma tells me not to put a tampon between my legs. For fear of cotton fornication.
|
216084
|
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.
|
216032
|
'Yer a cool, cool glass of water baby....'
|
216011
|
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.
|
215954
|
Often we sit in silence and age. We are observers of dust, fashioning ourselves into antiques.
|
21591611
|
He runs a mail-order business from a storefront and distributes a catalog of disappeared things.
|
215987
|
Megan beat up on herself later over the unsaid.
|
21591313
|
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…
|
2159128
|
Two-way conversation with God.
|
21592011
|
...he thought often of the rollicking waves, of being pulled under, of being weightless and senseless...
|
215810
|
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…
|
215863
|
For some, a vertical pattern will evoke prison bars, for others, product bar codes.
|
215795
|
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…
|
215711
|
“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.
|
21572016
|
Just bring me his head, that cerebral kiln of hot, ruddy verbiage and cadence.
|
21571310
|
I need a different storage solution
|
215796
|
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. …
|
215782
|
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.
|
21561013
|
pluck me from the charred grate
|
215674
|
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.
|
215600
|
Azure walked through the fog as though she were walking to class. Her hands swayed through the mist and felt the thickness of the cloud through her fingers
|
215696
|
Okay, no freaking out. I mean, this isn't a suicide note. This is suicide fiction.
|
215663
|
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.
|
215563
|
“Now God,” Mr. Smashface calls me out by name.
|
215511
|
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.
|
215550
|
once wedding cake
under pillows.
now fluffy frosting
on squashed defeat
|
215462
|
It’ll die in there and the stairwell’ll stink for weeks, Greg says in the car. We’re quiet, considering that.
|
215432
|
...and 55 words to tell you about it.
|
