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“And if you ever tell anybody what I’m about to tell you, I’ll deny it.”

Byron’s mother read things to him: Language is fun. Play. Let’s play.

Liza Donnelly

“Stop looking at women’s magazines and call me in the morning.”

He’s become insufferable since that MacArthur fellowship.

New cartoons from Ken Krimstein, Lydia Conklin, Farley Katz, and more!

Arnold’s daily life was a race between money and death.

They peer into their mirrors to see whatever is bearing down.

I’m trying to believe I can sense the river when I can’t. Hard to call beauty an affliction, but I think it is what makes my blindness hurt.

All that I’ve had, I’ve left propped up in a glass vase: cut stems at rest.

Their marriage had dwindled to a separation and a running joke.

I yell at the boys: “What are you doing! Are you out of your minds?”

My grandfather has a space where the tip of his thumb should be.

I want to change the subject, but I can’t. I need to think about dying.

He got his wife off a German farmer, for whom he went to work one day.

I like to take little sips of the horror, morsels of poisoned meat.

Ira and Ada are stepsiblings. Within a month they were sleeping together.

We want no truck with death. Not now while we’re busy feasting on figs.

Your face is a grain of rice, one small nothing on the world’s horizon.

shoulds & shouldn’ts unwound now to dids & didn’t

Every morning I wipe the sweat from the hollow of my master’s throat.

I was constantly being torn between belief and disbelief in his narrative.

She had instinct for seeing what she could make happen.

Like an idiot, I was flattered at first to get honorary degrees.

We are nothing; less than nothing, we are only what might have been.

The streets were filled with couples and families on their way home.