There was a town where bombs did not fall.
There was a crooked street and very narrow, where centuries of crooked rain dug trenches
in the cobblestone. Legend has it that if a woman steps in those trenches, she is sure to
marry in town. There were, in the town square, weft and warp loom vestiges of hands that
beamed spinning all those silky wool centuries.
There were two pigeons mating for life in alabaster and Katzenjammer.…
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1. There is no off-season for purchasing tickets to and from South Florida. Your
mother will suggest you pay with your credit card and that she will reimburse you.
Sometimes she does, and sometimes she doesn’t. You always get seated next to
chatty President Taft look-alikes. You imagine them naked and stuck in bathtubs.
2. You don’t realize how easy it is to leave your friends, until the weekly phone calls
become monthly liked Facebook statuses.
3. In college, you will try singing for the first time. You find that you are a decent
singer. You never get any leads in the musicals, but you don’t care much for weeks
of long rehearsals, anyway, and so you enroll in a musical theater course. You will
send your high school sweetheart a video of your first recital.…
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He knelt by the pool, gazing at its calm surface. Why? Why did the man staring back at
him seem so much better than he was? How was it that appearances could so easily deceive? He
ran a hand along his cheek, his mirror image copying the motion.
Everything was so much easier, so much better, when only the surface was visible. In that
world, he was nearly perfect. Young, handsome, confident, wealthy. It was all apparent with just
one glance—one quick look was all that was needed to characterize a person. They would see a
charming smile, a trustworthy face, and if they never saw him again, that was all he would ever
be to them.
Why couldn’t he be all that?
The complexity inside him corrupted all of it.…
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No author can ever convince you a character exists. They describe a shell; a woman, for
arguments sake. She’s taller than you, and sees the world from a different angle.
Something might look round, but she could tell you it’s really square from up top. She
wears glasses, whichhelp her see that this thing is square, and her glasses, too, have
square frames. But there are other things about her besides her poor eyesight boxed
by thick, black plastic.
She lost a child once. A child that she didn’t want to have, but she can tell you where it
would have gone to school and what its name would have been, (she picked a name that
was deliberately unisex). The father wasn’t a very nice man, and she never wanted to see
him again.…
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Life as an English major isn’t as easy as people might think. Sure, we read books and
discuss them while math majors slave away at finding the derivatives of multi-variable
equations, but just because one sounds easier than the other doesn’t make it necessarily
true. Four of the girls I live with are business/math majors and they are constantly on
my back for doing nothing but reading chapter four of Frankenstein for the fifth time
while they pull allnighters and skip classes to study for their next accounting class.
In fact, they take it one step further by even saying that there is no real use for reading
those books and writing pointless explanatory papers and that the only reason I have
chosen this route in college is to “take the easy way out.”…
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“I don’t think she’s breathing!”
It had been the dining room before they had installed the hospice bed, had scurried in
with the paraphernalia of a sick room, had hoisted a dying woman carefully but without
ceremony onto the sheets and covered her in blankets. Little non-decisions taken by the
family over a couple of days divided the awkward rectangular room, now a bedroom for
dying on one end and on the other a den-like space for waiting. By the time I got there,
the room held a couch, a piano bench, a dining chair. It held a bedside tray, a basket of
ointments and drugs, an old woman stertorously breathing. Her mouth hung open and
each breath exited with a wheeze, entered with a rattle, fought to keep the air coming in
even as the rest of her body from glands to kidneys gave up the fight.…
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I have always lived by the laws of flesh
shrinking tighter and shorter each hour.
Now I’ve nothing to lose but cracking skin.
Yet curiosity stretches wider, too strong an itch.
In liquid imagination, I swan dive into
the pool of my widest eye, splash down
into the vast blue ocean of mind,
wash my bones back to the civilized shore,
where those awaiting my last breath
pick the marrow clean.
On their solid beachhead, my skeleton
has no heart, only a hard brotherhood,
where nothing more than hollow bones
lean against one another
and begin to crack.
– Robert S. King…
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