Suppose we pick a name for him, eh?" Caius Pompeius stepped over and eyed the child. "He looks a little like my proconsul, Marcus. We could call him Marcus." Josiah Worthington said, "He looks more like my head gardener, Stebbins. Not that I'm sugges...
One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths...
Charlie slowly crumpled to the floor, Allison soon joining him. “Dinner is served!” Stanley trumpeted, as he reached into the steaming mass of offal and fished around for the teens’ livers. “Aha!” he crowed, as he lifted one liver in each h...
It just makes me realize how . . . fleeting life can be. How quickly it all passes by. And it's strange to read something written by someone whose life was really just beginning then but who's dead now." He nodded, looking like he was taking that in....
So you went back to your friend’s next donkament two weeks later, and this time you just laughed right along when they gave you that framed picture of the poker hands. And when they called you ‘pigeon,’ ‘fish,’ and ‘muppet,’ you just sm...
Did he understand, as those interminable minutes ticked by, that being alone is not the same as being lonely? That being alone is a neutral state; it is like a blind fish at the bottom of the ocean without eyes, and therefore without judgement. Is it...
The Plot Against The Giant First Girl When this yokel comes maundering, Whetting his hacker, I shall run before him, Diffusing the civilest odors Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers. It will check him. Second Girl I shall run before him, Arching c...
wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything. I think this to myself even though I love my daughter. She and I have shared the same body. There is a part...
People told me not to get married; I didn´t listen. No one ever listens, it seems to me now. Perhaps people should stop trying to communicate. N was not a communicator; early on, I´d insisted on communication. Now I see his point acutely. I would l...
I enjoy a torture session on the rowing machine and I also enjoy my mom’s homemade peach cobbler. I enjoy flopping like that dead fish with hips that can’t lie in dance class, and I also enjoy ordering pizza with my kid, renting a movie, and down...
Eating dinner with conservation biologists was like walking through a minefield of ethical decisions: grasslands have been overgrazed by steer raised for beef, and all cattle emit greenhouse gases though enteric fermentation; the poop from industrial...
What exists beneath the sea? I’d always pictured it in colors of emerald and aquamarine, where black velvet fish with sequined eyes swim among plankton. But, when my eyes adjust, I see gray stones, lost anchors, wet wood, buttons, hooks, and eyes, ...
As my grandfather once famously shouted, in a drunken stupor, “You can’t have fish tacos if you still have the hook in your mouth!” And while I have no idea what he meant, or how it’s relevant, I tell that story to any indigenous Mexican I me...
My New Year's Eve is always 2 July, the night before my birthday. That's the night I make my resolutions. And this year scares the life out of me, because no matter how successful, how good things appear, there is always a deep core of failure within...
All over the city lights were coming on in the purple-blue dusk. The street lights looked delicate and frail, as though they might suddenly float away from their lampposts like balloons. Long twirling ribbons of light, red, green, violet, were festoo...
My cough is much worse at night and often prevents me from sleeping. It is not so much the daytime tiredness that I resent, but the inability to proceed uninter- rupted with my dreams, to run and play with my fancies, and, at last, in the early hours...
In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes--courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc.--can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within u...
I’m Hana,” Hana says. “And this is Lena.” She jabs me with an elbow. I know I must look like a fish, standing there with my mouth gaping open, but I’m too outraged to speak. He’s lying. I know he’s the one I saw yesterday, would bet my ...
The pattern glitters with cruelty. The blue beads are colored with fish blood, the reds with powdered heart. The beads collect in borders of mercy. The yellows are dyed with the ocher of silence. There is no telling which twin will fall asleep first,...
When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil's walking parody On all four-footed things. The tatt...
[about to have sex in a car behind his restaurant] Nicky Santoro: I fly stuff in fresh every day. I get bread from back home, I get fish from California, and you can always tell a great kitchen like ours 'cause of the milk-fed veal. That's the secret...
