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Hope Larkwhistle, assistant librarian, went out with twenty-eight men in fourteen years. It was true; her friend Ted made her count. And each time, her pulse did not fail to race, her thoughts speeding along with it to match the poor fellow’s last name with her first.[...]
If you were poor, you could buy a used fax machine off a dead guy and not take any crap from anybody as a result. And you are poor; that’s the unfair thing. But your fiancee is not. So you have to take the crap on his behalf, with your own name written in, where [...]
Thackeray Fulbright gets lost and his colleagues try to help him, return him, point him in the right direction. Can you remember, Professor? Can you remember, Thackeray?
Wilie Taylor will have his face rubbed into the snow until he screams, he will deserve it because he punched me first. Shawn Thomas will be forced to ride a bicycle all the way down the street – he won’t know that the bike has no brakes, and he will crash, and hurt his arm. [...]
Their new stone cell had a hole in one wall about a foot wide and three feet tall. Through the hole the lush unfenced meadow which surrounded the prison could be seen — blue blades of grass rustling in a slight wind, pink and red and purple wildflowers arcing over the grass like fancy plumed hats.
We planned it as a reconciliation, “a time to bury all the old dead,” as you called it, as the first small hard drops, like cutting remarks, splashed against the windshield, punctuating the silence that would stretch out like the road before us…
I’m back from Vermont, sitting in the living room on a purple chair. The plants have not been watered. My shins are bruised. I still have the make-up on, but it’s smeared and blotchy. I wear Blanche’s dress, which I didn’t give…
Although you may find this hard to believe, I was once a little girl, and terribly discontent. My bones ached with it, my desires pointing like fingers in all directions. For instance, the year I visited the slaughterhouse, I longed for…
The class is restless. I’m also restless, but I’m the teacher; I’m paid 55 dollars a day not to be restless. Right now the kids are drawing pictures of their houses — not officially part of the second grade curriculum, but I was originally…
On Columbus and 106th opposite from a hotel on whose yellow neon sign a green monkey leaped and hung by its tail during the summer, near a burnt down cancer ward, I shared an apartment with three Juilliard students…