Fiction
With the fat stripped away, she is her essential self. They don’t tell you how beautiful people can be when they’re dying.
From the moment my friend George stepped from his loft to his death at the bottom of the building’s elevator shaft, there’s been one thing I can say I’ve known for sure—that love is dangerously overrated.
“Every family has one,” my sister Joyce liked to say. “One crazy uncle or aunt they can’t hide or forget.”
Something nobody warns you about, when you get very sick, is that you have to be polite. You have to be Emily f-ing Post every minute of the day,
Why he stopped showering, no one could say for sure, though everyone had their guesses.
“Kill me,” he pleaded, not exactly in those words, but clothed rather in the language of assisted suicide. He had no right to ask that of me.
Last night my breath changed from quiet to labored heaving. We all wonder: will this be my last bath?
“The difference between a good butthole and a bad butthole is the wink.” This is the best man talking.
Dotty Adams remarked that she hadn’t known there were any Jews in the neighborhood. Some people wondered if the men in long black coats and broad-brimmed hats were Goths, like those boys at Columbine.