2653 28 18
|
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.
|
2027 35 16
|
My heart beat someone up the stairwell.
|
7119 18 17
|
Why was the broom late for work?
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1665 27 14
|
Your writing offended the editors greatly, and we would select certain word choices we disliked, but we truly hated every word, including mere articles, prepositions, and conjunctions.
|
567 15 17
|
This is the best excerpt you'll ever read.
|
2035 21 18
|
Millie was a good woman, Bobby said. A good Christian woman. Well, I said, you can’t hold that against her.
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2000 25 14
|
Mama's good at finding things, but hardly ever what she's looking for.
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2055 17 18
|
It's that quiet comfortable darkness. One should feel it often and necessarily.
|
2105 21 17
|
There is a tall and leafy tree in our backyard. Also a bride, a groom, and a chicken.
|
2441 22 15
|
She leaned up on an elbow, smirked and touched his leg. “Want to do it?”
|
2153 25 15
|
Do you suppose you could make your female protagonist a salamander rather than a human?
|
2252 2 2
|
At a good distance, he stood. Hair, gray, stringy, long as a horse’s mane. His beard, thick, unkempt. Like a caterpillar, a smile worked across his face. No, he said. It won’t be another Miami. Not another Miami.
|
2557 20 13
|
Her eyes grew wide, moist, catching the low light, holding onto it as if an imprisoned lover. "So you come home." I smiled. Was she playing a game?
|
3297 32 14
|
She turned and looked at me as if she had just discovered me. A weak smile looped around the edges of her mouth but she didn't mean it. It was as if her brain had relayed a signal to her mouth to smile but the mouth didn't really want to, not really.
|
2318 21 13
|
This is my house. You park in the back.
*
This is a picture of flowers and hands.
|
2309 19 12
|
Say the word and I shall become
a photograph;
|
1962 18 17
|
"It's time to move the chair..."
|
2807 30 15
|
We met because I hate the actor Bruce Willis.
|
1992 17 12
|
The Gothic-filigreed gate creaks as a guard closes it behind the little girl in the ruffled dress. Standing there in the morning fog, on the sidewalk outside the reform school, she looks remarkably like Shirley Temple. Dimpled, chubby face. Pretty, party dress. Her…
|
1805 24 14
|
Our lives depend on/
engineers
|
4756 19 12
|
It was a sore molar that was giving me trouble, on the bottom right. The dentist, about whose adulterous affairs everybody in the neighborhood knew and whispered about, ts-ts-ts'ed me and murmured "decay" before pulling out the drill.
|
4134 2 1
|
Romper Room with Beer
We go out for a thin New York Pizza at Lanesplitter’s over on Telegraph and watch the drunks staggering out of the bar across the street to have a smoke on the sidewalk, since you can’t smoke inside bars anymore. They ga
|
2438 26 17
|
I would see her at the gym in the mornings.
|
2028 26 16
|
So, we are all healthy but suffering financially, not equally so, and the tendency to suffer financially has been caused by humbling ourselves to particular men. We take a quiz in moral values, phrased as a party game.
|
1753 18 14
|
it corrupts the smells//
and flavors of the world/
and plants its swollen face
|
6636 32 13
|
He entered the kitchen, carrying the silver metal scuttle filled with coal. The draught brought in the scent of woodbines. She paused her work, her hands resting inside the bread dough, and breathed deep, having…
|
69225 21 16
|
"Hey, Ceecee." Rodrigo squatted on our three step stoop every morning, flanked by pit bulls with wide black smiles puffing steam. I jogged down the steps, leaned against a parking sign. Warmed my hands with my breath. Tugged my crop top down. "Girl, you gonna…
|
1506 17 17
|
Something about shadows and last time and driving.
|
1597 18 17
|
Johan was telling stories about the occupation. The Germans were stupid, he said.
|
2931 18 16
|
How freeing to writhe under someone with more muscles than fat, who could keep it up longer than minute, who afterwards stroked my hair and if he noticed the fine silver strands by my ears didn’t mention them. I forget his name...
|