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Here’s the part where you pledge devotion until death, I told myself.

Joanna Walsh

How did I ever survive? Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I died back there.

They dust off facts like diamonds that excel in perfection under a monocle.

My country neither interested me nor inspired any sense of fealty.

“Rev. MacLean’s been stabbed in Oban,” his wife said, her voice thin.

What was he, twenty, no, twenty-two years younger than me.

It all started at Phillips Andover Academy when he was fourteen.

It’s not clear that Hemingway completely knew what he was doing.

The dean’s voice was stuck in my head. Plagiarism. Expulsion.

Tirelessly her arm rose and fell, till the child at last fell at her feet.

He picked up a fairy disguised as a go-go dancer and brought her home.

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad wins Pulitzer Prize.

Lust was just a frenzy of activity that had mostly led Benny in circles.

That autumn, my first in San Francisco, I ran short of money.

He could not help but take her as his wife. She was a scandal.

I could become something new. Improved. Like detergent.

He probably should have arrested or at least reported me to someone.

I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention.

Sitting beside a heap of steaming dung I felt in great poetic form.

On that still, snowy day, Mick’s neck popped like a flaming log.

Recently a man in my town took up residence on the football field.

My husband screws around. Not much and not often, but I know.

So long as there was money, the girl felt established, and brutally proud.

El Presidente was no longer in a mood to see the American press.

I can already feel the stone’s resistance as I work the first pass.

The dark creatures are still, yet they give life to the whole mountain.

His hands stiffened so that the fingers curled inward like gray claws.

The interrogator was both man and deity, prophet and god.