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The thumbnail spoke directly to the most excitable parts of himself.

“Dorm whores” his roommate calls them. They come for the booze.

He finds the note taped to the lid of the toilet: “There’s someone else.”

Beggars know to emerge when you’ve more than enough to give.

Grief is a rude houseguest. She stays up late. She leaves messes.

He had dreamed of being a front-runner, someone who changed lives.

Her hips, her pelvis, broke free of concerns. His eyes hovered.

“Hey, babe,” he said, breathing into the phone like a sex maniac.

I read cookbooks the way I do poetry, with a willingness to be transported.

This is the worst moment of her life, maybe of anybody’s life, ever.

We have mysterious inclinations. No one can explain it to us.

He’d been lost and tripping vividly on some speckled acid for days.

In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.

When I went to Scotland for a wedding, I didn't plan on firing a gun.

The most arcane sexual practices could arouse me from my torpor.

He was living like a coyote, out on the margins. But then a letter came.

All my life, I’d been shy, and I wasn’t about to change that.

In high school I walked around with a beat-up copy of Kafka’s stories.

Out by the road was her son standing without a stitch of clothing.

He felt desperate for the rains, mosquitoes be damned.

Since the accident she lost her hold on the world and never got it back.

Grandma was forced to break her vow of silence only three times.

She imagines his clothes on the floor, his arms wrapped around her waist.

I hope I do not baffle or bluff. I hope I will not raise your hopes.

I should look at what I’ve done. How loosely she let him come to me.

Her will is resolute, and he knows enough not to challenge it.

The clearest memory was when his father shot a grizzly.

The thing was, I didn’t care what I ate in front of a woman. Every day, I told her things I would have been too embarrassed to tell anyone else.

In school, he was called gook, chink, and one boy called him ching-chong.

He probably had an order. Ludes, Dexis, Black Birds—who knew.