102

Today was the first day of the rest of her life.

101

Plans laid ever so carefully and mulled over and over in the difficult gray folds of your brain, often disintegrate so easily.

100

Did you ever meet Maybe? I did, once. That's the stupidest name I've ever heard, Maybe. Like her parents looked at her and weren't sure about her yet, and said to each other "Maybe," and the nurse thought it was some new-fangled name and scratched it onto the birth certificate and by the time her parents got around to naming her, it was already too late, the ink was dry, the nurse was done with her shift and off to sleep for hours and hours and play with her little dog, whose name was Molly, a common, sensible, nice name, not like Maybe.

99

And the moment of flying
And the small burst of light
And the the fire's red glow
And the essence of flight

How you're tossed in the air
How you're spread in the sky

How you will be millions
How you will soon die

In pieces and pieces and pieces and pieces and pieces and pieces.

98

There's a sort of camera in some people's minds somethimes. It's one of those extra special, extra sensory cameras that can zoom real far and see real wide, those panoramic shots like from above or below that take up the whole sky, or your whole face, pores and all, just everything.

97

October 6

you can't explain heartbreak, you can't define love

but our infinite feeling transcended that dripping grass and that sky and that day

96

I first saw her sitting on a bus stop looking just like a ninety-year-old woman. Her mouth was thin and her skin was juiceless. I asked her how she was.

"Adequate," she replied, with a snap so vicious I believe she may have broken her teeth.

95

I screamed so loudly I couldn’t even hear it myself. You know, like when the water’s so hot it feels like cold? When you’re so happy you feel sad. Yeah, like that. I probably woke people up for three miles. I didn’t care. I guess they should have known not to leave a dead guy on my lawn.

94

The womb is not a prison,

The mother’s not a saint

93

One day the wind blew in from the west gently taking with it the winter and the sounds and smells of winter and leaving in its place the softly molded spring. On that day, I decided to get into my car and drive to a place I had never been before. It didn’t really work I guess. I found myself at all the same places I’d been before.

92

She dreamt of elevators, cables snapping they would fall and fall and fall until the second before they slammed into the floor, then they would miraculously save themselves.

91

They felt like mosquito bites throbbing gently, itching quietly, on the surface of her heart, each one a little bit different in size and dimension, reminding her from time to time of their existence. She never forgot any of them. Her embarrassments, blunders like bubbles swaying mockingly in the wind that surrounded her.

90

"I will always be my father's son" he said as he chugged air like water in greedy gulps

Floyd Wallace was a sensitive soul.

86

When he was a small child, his brother told him that if you smiled often, eventually the smile would start to make your face collapse until it was all gone, and you would be faceless. So he never smiled. Not once.

85

She craved that swoony feeling more than anything, wanted to feel it from her gut to her legs and in her head in the middle of the night when she awoke for a glass of water, savoring the unforgettable, the blissful, the extraordinary. But these feelings, as most, have an expiration date, and theirs, like milk or eggs happens much more quickly than others, so the swoon turns into the memory of a swoon, and by and by, she couldn't remember the feeling at all without also feeling a quick little pinch of distaste, a sour sensation, a rotten egg.