The other camels hobbled nearby snort and chuff and in general make a lot of noise betwixt them. Though they are called ships of the desert, these camels are nothing like our fishing boats. They are good for milk and their turds are spectacularly fire-worthy. But none of us have yet figured out how to…
Say what you will about the patient in twelve: to me he was not an exceptional case. None of them were. Strictly speaking it is never the dying who are exceptional, for the dead will always outnumber the living. It is we who are the imperiled minority—we who plod on alone in the shadow of…
For breakfast, Jake takes six plastic vitamin bottles out of the cupboard and empties one of each onto the counter: iron, B-12, zinc, C, E, and a multi for good measure. He yawns, lines the tablets up on his hand, takes a diet Mountain Dew from the refrigerator, and washes them down in a single…
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…
He surprised himself by claiming his father’s old nickel-finish Colt revolver. There was no battle to be fought here—no one else wanted the thing; no one wanted any of the guns that now were lined up in the cabinet (they couldn’t sell them, a legal issue, something about permits, which everyone agreed, though annoying, sounded…
For four days I’d been sitting at a conference table with engineers from the different outfits that had been pulled together for this project, and across the table was a guy who I’d bonded with after I saved his hide on some controls issues and he saved mine on some line specs. Since then, we…
She wasn’t surprised to end up in his office, but she’d always thought it would be about her son, not her daughter. There was a lesson in it: Instead of worrying about the ones who didn’t fit in, you should worry about the ones who seemed to fit in too well. “It’s not uncommon,” he…
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