5.07 / July 2010

Lapin When they were young, they took the male and female rabbit out of their separate cages and set them in the bright wet spring grass. The rabbits, young as well, were uneasy. In the circle of three children they sat twitchy and still.

That Friday you are met by a pool full of retards: downs kids so broken some wear helmets.   Prior to this day your mother and you go to the Y to deal with her post aneurism weakness, and you usually have the place to yourself.

John’s cock was a hot poker. In, in, in, in. July grimaced and bit lip, drew blood there as well as there. Afterwards she foetal curled while he sweet whispered soothing. “It’ll get better. The first time always hurts.” He couldn’t stay with a woman who didn’t enjoy sex.

Lydia has a body made of bones. Her ribs are candy canes sucked clean by the puckered lips of a child, her limbs hard and white like the naked branches of a sycamore. Lots of people ask me what it’s like, dating a skeleton. It’s no different from loving anyone else, I tell them.

This isn’t working. I can’t think she said. Her voice was too flat and he would be disappointed. My thoughts aren’t connecting she said. She meant the threads tying one idea to the next idea were frayed before she even knew what to tie them to.

QUEEN MOTHER BRARD AND HER MALE HELPER drove into Danville to the Bonanza. She kept making a big deal about being there. She put their meals on her Senior Club Card. Her helper went into the restroom and pointed his wiener down in the toilet. He went to the bathroom in the toilet.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_7/Gann.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] We stood whistling on the town beach.   A few miles down, a dead tiger washed up on the sand.   The crowd gathered around the tiger had swollen to the dunes by the time we arrived. “How on Earth?” people asked over and over.

He kept a catalog of women’s eyes. Not just green, brown, blue, or hazel, but the shapes of eyes, almond or hooded or deep-set or Oriental, and how evenly spaced they were or weren’t, and how long the eyelashes, and how thick the eyebrows, and plucked or not plucked.

Gift’s mother left when he was only five years old. One day she was everywhere in their house, her perfume filling even the crevices where his marbles rolled. And the next she was gone.   According to his father, she left no explanation. But, Gift found a note tucked under his pillow.

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At the ages of six and nine we understood simply the ‘theory of everything.’ The 11th dimension was condensed down to – a ball of twine unwound, vibrating secrets strung between girls and two tin cans once filled. Two decades later, we understand nothing, simply.

Marcy says he loves you, you know and I nod because it’s easier than telling her she’s wrong. I can see it, she says. Marcy is two years older and got her period the summer before me.

All the way from Spokane to Omaha, meat-packing capitol of the nation, I study my legs, tan from laying out in the yard. Before I left, my mother made me apply mustache removal cream, said you can’t meet the colonel looking like that.

The table is in a restaurant in a building that was built in 1885. The building was remodeled in 1915 and again in 1952 after it was found that a broken sewage pipe had been weakening the foundation for decades.

There’s no reason for the old man to weigh in; he’s looking out the window, toward the lake slicked nicely with nutrients: he’s not concerned with who they are or where they’ve been.

Sylvia Pincus could not tell her daughter, Daphne, that she still watched Late Night with George Rockland, but she felt justified: It was a way of working through her feelings about Daphne’s recent divorce, and about Daphne’s now ex-husband, George Rockland.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_7/swartwood.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The chameleon kid is standing beside a tree. Nobody can see the chameleon kid because, in a sense, he has become that tree. The grainy bark, the knots, even the dull green leaves—the chameleon kid is able to morph all of those aspects into himself.

An old woman with a face as colonial as the town hands you a cold drink brewed with corn and she tells you in Spanish how she knows you are an American because you only speak English and she warns you of the thing that scares you most: “You’re going to love this country.

love stories 1. My mother tells me sex is when penis is in a vagina, but she says she doesn’t know how or why. She says it is one way and then another. She says she will ask my father how it works. 2.

I. God is man squared. That is to say, God is man raised to a higher power. Man is the root, the square root, of God. We believe in the ideal (truth, wisdom, justice, honor, integrity, selflessness, sacrifice, compassion, goodness) and God is the name we give to that ideal.