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Going After Cacciato

It was a bad time. Billy Boy Watkins was dead, and so was Frenchie Tucker. Billy Boy had died of fright, scared to death on the field of battle, and Frenchie Tucker had been shot through the neck. Lieutenants Sidney Martin and Walter Gleason had died in tunnels. Pederson was dead and Bernie Lynn was…

A Death Warrant

508. And behold! There were blossoms in the wind, and there were blossoms in the moving letters of the death warrant, and the wind moved them not, for behold the wind was stayed in its course, and there were flocks in the river, crossing the river, and the river moved against them, and behold no…

from Satires II, vi

Oh my Sabine farm, when shall I see you, when again With old authors, with sleep and lazy hours Can I find sweet forgetfulness of painful life? Oh when will the beans (Pythagoras’ cousins!) lie close With the greens well oiled with fat bacon? Oh nights and feasts of the gods! when I and my…

Cellar Full of Water

"Hi, honey." "Oh, Daddy," Carolyn said. "It took you so long. Where are you calling from?" "The hospital," he said. "Where else? I haven't stuck my nose out of this cotton-picking place since eight o'clock this morning, and I don't feel like going home." "Well, how is she?" "I think she knew me, but she…

Closer to Your World

     Tom and Nancy were walking along the esplanade.      ”You see that guy walking ahead of us, with the shorts on? The one with so much hair on his legs. You know, I’d been looking at that guy for at least five minutes before I realized that he was also wearing a pair of black nylon…

Ellery Street

How much too eloquent are the songs we sing. nothing we tell will tell how beautiful is the body. It does not belong even to him or her who lives in it. Beautiful the snail’s body which it bears laboriously in its way through the long garden. The old lady who lives next door has…

Vestiges

It is an early autumn Sunday evening. Still warm and Michael has not made love to me since August. Each night he sleeps as he sleeps tonight, facing the window with his knees drawn up away from me. This lack of attention is not, he says, because he doesn't want me; it is, he says,…

Reality Principle

Life was cheap in South America. Anything could happen there. That was one way. He was tired. That was another. So many of his erotic daydreams began that way. He’d lie in his bed and masturbate, usually just before he got up. Many of them had to do with the way they’d survive after an…