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Illnessexpand_moreI don’t want fiction. What I want is truth. Or someone’s version of it.
A gravely ill man was waiting for me in a village ten miles distant.
There was no sense in brushing off or any other civilized thing.
My grandfather committed my grandmother to a mental asylum.
Frank kept his face blank as he read the orders: Report to Berlin.
She had been sleeping more and more as the tour went on.
Marie was therefore exiled, as it were, like Cordelia in the old play.
They went to pray for the dead. It was important to shed some tears.
We are in his car. “Bell, I’m starving. Want to go for a burger or pizza?” I panic. Pizza. 285 calories per slice. Burgers. Harder to estimate.
Royal baby George is tucked in the crook of his mother’s elbow.
When he had passed from view, I stumbled back from the window.
How much simpler and more satisfying was the company of men.
The tree was shaggy and it bore scars of shrapnel from the war.
There was something in her voice, some awful, enduring fire.
It’s there and then it’s gone, just light through the window.
The author reflects on a soldier’s experience, in just six words.
Mostly he was in a hurry, so he’d just stick it in and away we’d go.
Why did it take Steven’s small coffin to get me to see my own son?
When you are sixteen and sixty-five pounds, you are all shadows.
Everything they needed was there. Everything they needed, they had.
Tony’d had guns pulled on him more times than he had toes.
It is our first time, both of ours. This sentence ends with hate myself.
My father made me watch softball on ESPN 2 to help me stay alive.
The appendix on political correctness explains why none of that is funny.
I had the tongue of an adder and my heart was black with rage and hate.
You are afraid pain itself might develop a way to communicate.
she was sixteen, and swimming. she was seventy-one, and soft.
I tell him: junkies are the only people worth talking to about love.
I tried mightily, but no longer could I ladle those ancient words into the air.
The elevator inside him begins to fall with dizzying speed.
