A new group, flexitarians, who eat meat if not too many people are watching.
You’ve got her mad now and there’s no turning back. All she has to do is go to the authorities, saying you molested her. Is that what you want? One little phone call and your life is ruined.’ ‘But I d...
You’re the man now, she said to me after my father died, you’re the man. Then she turned to Popeye, our calico tom, and said, You’re the cat now, Popeye, you’re the cat,
You’re not supposed to talk about your good deeds, I know. It effectively negates them and in the process makes people hate you. If there’s a disaster, for instance, and someone tells me he donated fi...
You’d think I’d have addressed my drinking, at least in the privacy of my diary, but it’s rarely mentioned. To type that word—alcoholic—would have made it real, so I never recounted the talking-tos I...
With practice I will eventually realize my goal; in the meantime, come to Paris and you will find me, headphones plugged tight in my external audio meatus, walking the quays and whispering, 'Has anyth...
Why go to a store when you could go to a museum? she might ask. Um, because the museum doesn’t sell shit? My sisters and I refuse to feel bad about shopping. And why should we? Obviously we have some...
Whereas our other grandparents asked what grade we were in or which was our favorite ashtray, Ya Ya never expressed any interest in that sort of thing. Childhood was something you endured until you we...
When the week was over, we went to Paris. There are any number of stores there that time seems to have forgotten. At one of them I bought five rubber noses. That’s one for every serial killer I read a...
When I was seven years old, my family moved to North Carolina. When he was seven years old, Hugh’s family moved to the Congo. We had a collie and a house cat. They had a monkey and two horses named Ch...
When I saw myself through my parents’ eyes, I saw a worm crawling through mud and shit toward a psychedelic mushroom, but when I saw myself through hers, I felt that things were possibly not as bad as...
What were you asleep? Helen would say as I opened the door. I've been up since five. In her hand would be aluminum tray covered with foil, either that or a saucepan with a lid on it.Well, I'd tell her...
What they hear is senseless noise. It’s like us trying to discern emotion in the hum of a hair dryer or the chortle of an engine as it fails to turn over. That’s the drawback but also the glory of cre...
What if I’d wasted my entire life comparing myself with people who didn’t really matter? Try as I might, I still can’t wrap my mind around it.
Watching him was like opening the door to a siniging telegram; you know it's supposed to be entertaining, but you can't get beyond the sad fact that this person actually thinks he bringing some joy in...
Watch this. 'Buenos Dios, Miguel.'A small, dark-eyed man looked up from his wood splitting, alarmed.
Walking home with the back half of the twelve-foot ladder I turned to look in the direction of Hugh’s loft. 'You will be mine,' I commanded.
WHEN ASKED What do we need to learn this for? any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and sta...
Use the word y’all, and before you knew it, you’d find yourself in a haystack French-kissing an underage goat. Along with grits and hush puppies, the abbreviated form of you all was a dangerous step o...
To know the narrative in advance is to turn yourself into a machine, the Manager continues. What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and a...