She’s started refusing furs. She turns up her nose at mink. She will not wear weasel. She won’t allow me the coonskin cap, either. It’s all about collegiate dress, she tells me, and one doesn’t wear furs to lecture.
Read MoreAt first I thought it meant there is no escape from the spiral of life’s endless quest for entertainment, and I recited it, in my youngest adulthood, so young it could barely be called that, in a town called Villedieu—it means God’s town—of which, in France, there are too many to keep track
Read MoreI have a friend who is nagged by this memory of a very indecent Garfield comic strip. He says it is actually quite sexy, but incredibly perverse, and not just because it involves an anthropomorphic cat and meatloaf.
Read MoreGloria watches him intently, her perfect first child.
More swimmers arrive and go to the raft. Her son swims away from them and joins her on the shore.
“I knew you would come in when other people arrived. I know how you are,” she says. “You have always been a loner.”
Read MoreShortly after her first period, Valentine begins finding traps around her house. At first they are small—snares made of shoelace that snake along the hallway, glue traps in her bedroom closet—and sporadic. In no time, though, she’s finding larger traps: nets that span the length of her driveway, fishing lures cast from panel vans, muscle cars, matte-black Mustangs measled with Bondo.
Read MoreHe snaps off the radio and goes after the man, asking himself what kind of person would be contemptuous of another man’s tears—whipping himself towards righteousness, he thinks his rage is not with the man in particular but a condemnation of a prevalent attitude toward vulnerability: that our feelings are excremental, involuntary, a mere accident of our relationship with the world, motivating but unwilled, thus in some essential way not our own; an avalanche coming down upon the self.
Read MoreAcross the desert, marines are touching themselves. This is happening. One is slouched against the rear wall of a guard post at the north-facing perimeter of a forward operating base unbuttoning his trousers to air out his barrel, to clear out his bore before his partner returns.
Read More—Mother won’t have him in the house. Malodorous little rodent, she calls him. Have to keep you here at the station, don’t I? You’re not a rodent, he said into the ferret’s fur. You munch on rodents for breakfast. We’ll never have rats in our jail, will we?
Read MoreOh Mr. Roth—how to get old. How to come to terms with the inevitable. With our own short-sightedness. How not to feel regret? And where to find solace? In the moment, right? In the playing of each moment as if it were our last. Except that’s no way to live—though it might be a way to make art: and if you’re an artist, how to separate one from the other?
Read MoreI’ll be home shortly if this is only a kiss, a short kiss, a momentary lapse, the death of a star, not to be felt until much later.
Read MoreThe idea crept into my mind, and festered, that maybe Shirley wasn’t even a child at all, that our “daughter” was actually an underdeveloped twenty-something escaping the barbed poverty that forces people to prey upon the good intentions of others in order to survive.
Read More“So,” Tad said, “Did you see the aliens?”
Constance and Bill looked startled. As if this was the question that made the evening strange.
Although I was grateful to Tad for raising the subject, I also resented him. I should have thought of it. I placed my clog directly atop his sneakered foot and pressed down gently.
Read MoreWe wrote a novel together. Leaps of imagination—gender, age—opened up points of view. Prompts took us into authentic dialogue, imagined conversations, compression and expansion of time, significant details, descriptions, revision, and research.
Read MoreSome of us aren’t meant to survive, even if everyone is constantly telling us how. Even if we have the blueprints for everything we’ll ever need. We just keep buying the wrong pants for our blood types.
Read MoreWe feared health inspectors. We feared someone with a clipboard and a badge coming in and asking to see the back rooms, the prep kitchen, the basement. At any time someone could shut us down because of the obvious rat infestation.
Read More1. Took the medicine, left the dog.
—Zachary Kennedy-Lopez
The tiger hadn’t reacted to the looming finger. Why not? the mother thought, disappointed. Just a snarl. Or swipe of a claw. Not to hurt the boy, of course, but because that’s what tigers did. The mother was pleased the beasts did not act like real beasts, but shouldn’t they at least have the instinct to protect themselves?
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A place where I stand and think, If the race war pops off it’s me and my half-Mexican friend against these 700 cowboys.
Read MoreWednesday was quiet, for the most part. During lunch Jerry wondered if we might have a Clear Day (CD). It’s been nearly a year and a half since we had a CD. Sam, who sits in the Productivity Stall behind me, heard us talking and wanted to start placing bets. I didn’t think it was a good bet since a CD is so rare now. Sam is always trying to predict how things turn out. I stayed out of it.
Read MoreHe says I have striking eyes and he’s staying in a condo behind the Gillette building. I have normal eyes. Of medium size and average color. The shade of slush. So he lacks imagination. That’s fine.
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