I remember, most vividly, the tea my mother used to dye her auburn hair, the soup of crushed marigolds, rose hips, and paprika. It was crimson, like the blood that drips from Pete and Willow’s goats this morning, young wethers with slit throats strung up on a clothesline. I’m busy enough to look away, forget…
Irish Maupin, immobile again in her old city, in a tearoom with white linens, sat fatter than she’d ever been, fatter than anyone had ever been in the history of recording such things. Faint from eating too little too fast, she found in a ruffle of her collar a sliver of candied grapefruit peel. She…
This nighttime beach is suddenly a sandy stage, and we’re blinking at our audience in their spotlight: two guys in a speedboat trolling for castaways. Everyone comes out of their stupor quicker than me. Candi chants “S.O.S., S.O.S.” and the others yell “Woo-hoo!” and “Yeah!” as if they’re at a concert. I’m the only one…
It is a fine ring of white plaster and red bricks. I saw Juan Belmonte, bullfight idol, here once…when he came down to watch the bulls brought in. This night the fodder for tomorrow’s show was being brought in, too. Files of men, arms in the air. —Jay Allen, “Slaughter of 4,000 at Badajoz,…
What they don’t seem to understand is that I like things the way they are. It’s become very fashionable for people to appear on these television shows, these so-called reality programs about people BURIED ALIVE, people DROWNING IN THEIR OWN POSSESSIONS, obese old men surrounded by expired, unrefrigerated yogurt containers and wisp-haired, rail-thin ladies with dead cats rotting underneath piles…
After Samuel died and I had to move up north to live with Faith and her husband Dan, I got rid of almost everything I owned. Not that I wanted to, but there was no space in their drafty house near the river for their things and my things too. I really only had a…
I always sat in the back of Mr. Kim’s algebra class. He was very enthusiastic about algebra. I drew a picture of me sticking my dick into Rex’s blond dreamgirl. Rex was on the other side of the room. I folded the paper and wrote Rex on the top, and told this ugly girl, Andrea…
The wolves came down from the hills and carried away the children of Chinook. The village lay wedged into a horseshoe beneath those white hills, twelve winding miles from Norton Sound. First one child was taken at the start of winter as he tugged his sled at the edge of a slope; another was snatched…
The tribute was held downtown, far away from the theater district. Christine crossed the street gingerly, on four-inch heels thin as pencils—Ivan had always loved women in high heels—and checked the address against the invitation in her purse. The building was new and modern, the front window lettered with Cyrillic characters and a boldface translation:…
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