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Conversation
It’s like a death, but it’s worse. Because this is the last time I’ll speak with you and we’re both angry. I’m yelling something, but I’m looking at the rumple between your mouth and your nose, watching it as you press together your lips. The words continue, but my voice has long since drowned away.…
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Gibraltar
We expect the days like this, but they come only when they like, and carrying their monstrous young inside them, waiting. There were dust motes, but Philip didn’t see them. Nor could he remember faces, just then, nor forms. There simply was the sea. And Africa! he reminded Alice, pointing to the coast, inanely, which…
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Summer Postmodern
The boy has black hair that’s clipped to be unkempt. From a mall bench, he eyes two girls, who wander past in the distraction of gossip and pre-ripped jeans. He wonders which he would prefer. But he stops himself, in curt distaste, when he sees them enter a store he would not go to himself.…
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Pictures of Michael’s Kin
1. Mother. She must be. I think. Hands are folded, mouth is folded, below a collapsible razor nose. But that was before that type of folding razor, and my mother wouldn’t have had one for a nose, anyway. The eyes, though, there are elements in the eyes. Pigments, I guess I mean. Crushed up cobalt…
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Shadow-boxers
Here’s how I saw De Quincey High then: stained bathroom walls; pregnant girls; boys with knives and guns and bandanas; teachers with fear so engrained that it folded into their faces in wrinkles; a gym that could have been a prison; a cafeteria that was one; cheap lipstick and cheaper condoms; a dirt track; fences.
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Introducing William Brown
Sweet and scum-kneed childhood, like shy adolescence and even bickery elder-age, touts certain requisite activities. When one is about eight, it’s morally reprehensible not to spend a portionable amount of wet afternoons in rubber boots kicking up mud puddles. Skipping – in different patterns, no less – is also very important, and may even supplant…
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Bike-Riding is for the Cool Kids
After reexamining my near-two years of motley New Jersey life, I can write with some assurance that my most traumatic Princetonian experience took place in transit, one December at seven-thirty in the company of a bike named Jen. I had been buying books at Micawber and, feeling a need for a bit of Motown, closed…
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North
Coming up a stairwell, I stop. A custodian, a man holding a feather duster, has also stopped at the midway landing to let two women pass. They descend to the landing, past the man and the duster, then past me, and I recall nothing of them but a single red shoe. It’s a dull thing,…
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Natural Highs (and Lows?)
Through the grass I slowly slide to a great big stone. The sun is shining, I am warm, and I hope I’m left alone. He’s flying. His mouth makes a happy triangle, widening over toothy blips. One dimple stretches into a line. Two eyes glisten, bugging just a tad. One eyebrow is tilted up and…
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Women or Work?
The last time I faced the agreeable task of opining on theatrical matters in a writerly fashion was a gaping decade ago. I was ten, I was wide-eyed, and I was smitten with Grendel. Or was it Grendel’s mother? That sector of my occluded past involves a stint in a British university town that had,…
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Statuesque
Dear Mr. Eastman, I don’t speak to just anyone. That’s by choice. Most people say really really dumb things. Even when they have the chance to figure out what they’re going to say beforehand. Like on the news. Ms. Fuchsia-blazer makes mistakes reading aloud the scripted story she didn’t come even come up with herself.…
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Looking for Love in the Stacks
The distant summer I was a naive seventeen, I remember lobbying my then-boyfriend for a date-visit to a particular bookstore. He, a bibliophile, and I, a bibliophile, the proposition was ideal. We could hold hands and with our other hands rifle through select publications, pausing now and then to turn our looks of longing from…