He couldn’t speak words he didn’t know about feelings, truths, mysteries, and ecstasies he didn’t understand. He couldn’t bring himself to speak of the shame amplifying within him, though he tried, parting this stitched-up lips to speak.
Be My Man
Compassion Fatigue
Though fascist-like, it was only because of her mother's idiosyncratic serving style that she could roughly track the course of the evening. She’s sure it happened sometime between caviar baskets and pâté de canard sandwiches.
Grocery
I’m stealing cough syrup and size-six gel insoles. Appropriate clothing is necessary. Insoles in the jacket. Robitussen in the backpack. The weight of these things in the clothes. They pull me down a little. Closer to the earth. I’m not a thrill seeker and I’m no role model. I seek only an equilibrium.
Flock Apart – Editor’s Pick
The boiler was an oven, three stories high, tiled inside with innumerable iron plates. It incinerated bark and limbs and waste wood to power the generators that ran the paper mill, burning twenty-four-seven, except when, like that afternoon twenty years ago, it needed to be overhauled. That’s when they fed people like Mo and me into the boiler.
Return of the Death God
Maria saw the bean pods hanging from the lone tree and felt the rough texture of loose fibers tightening around her throat. She coughed. The image of young men swinging from the further pines haunted her view; young black men floating in starched suits, some with rope and others with barbed wire set alight like hanging torches.
The Friend/Enemy Distinction – Editor’s Pick
So Jeremiah quit, uncertain of his prospects, and unable to say what the future held in store. All he knew was that he could no longer continue as a student. If Walter Benjamin couldn’t make it as an academic, he decided, university life was not for him either. He returned to his library books and found a job as a barista in the café across the street from his apartment in downtown Oakland.