short-story

Lending my voice to a dedicated readership is a match made in heaven.

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don__ have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up__p, up. And _ down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I__ on my feet again. See, I__ starting to roll it up again. Don__ try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock.

She__ the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She__ the self-made girl!(_)Well, to begin with, the self-made girl__ a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn__ self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.

What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.

Before he went away, he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the picture that strongly impressed him. She was possible doutbless only in America; American life had smoothed the way for her. She was not fast, nor emancipated, nor crude, nor loud, and there wasn__ in her, of necessity at least, a grain of the stuff of which the adventuress is made.She was simply very successful, and her success was entirely personal. She hadn__ been born with the silver spoon of social opportunity, she had grasped it by honest exertion. You knew her by many different signs, but chiefly, infallibly, by the appearance of her parents. It was her parents who told her story; you always saw how little her parents could have made her. Her attitude with regard to them might vary in different ways. As the great fact on her own side was that she had lifted herself from a lower social plane, done it all herself, and done it by the simple lever of her personality, it was naturally to be expected that she would leave the authors of her mere material being in the shade.(_)But the general characteristic of the self-made girl was that, though it was frequently understood that she was privately devoted to her kindred, she never attempted to impose them on society, and it was striking that, though in some of her manifestations a bore, she was at her worst less of a bore than they. They were almost always solemn and portentous, and they were for the most part of a deathly respectability. She wasn__ necessarily snobbish, unless it was snobbish to want the best. She didn__ cringe, she didn__ make herself smaller than she was, she took on the contrary a stand of her own and attracted things to herself.Naturally she was possible only in America, only in a country where whole ranges of competition and comparison were absent.

Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.

We made the choice, right there in our local coffee shop, that we were going to do things differently. We were going to put the story first, no matter where that led us. We__ open ourselves up to all genres, all forms. We__ publish works that stayed with us in an intangible way, long after that last page is turned.

Rebecca woke up with her knees hurting and her fingers ice-cold, and the specifics of her life returned to her as the dream disappeared: weekend, hotel room, Baguio, memory, memory, memory.

Any moment now, I thought, he was going to wake up. Any moment.

One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings.

How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike. They stood like the naked pipes of a vast derelict calliope, their mouths cut into frantic vents. And now the great hand of mania descended upon one hundred-throated, unending scream.

I remember clearly the afternoon that she stood at the corner beside the door of the tourist centre in Gdansk.

The four of us got back into the car. In an instant, I distinctly heard a __oundless music_. It was the melody of friendship, the sound of a perfectly tuned quartet who got together by chance, four hearts playing in harmony.

As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.

Lim Oh Kee kills himself in the early hours on the 12th day of December, 1921. His last meal is rice and nothing.

The pupil of a goat's eye is elongate like a cat's, but if you look closely you'll see that it's in the horizontal position, and if you look closer still you'll see that it's less gracefully shaped, more of a ragged slot, dirty yellow. And you'll see that the white of a goat's eye is all black.

she should have told me that times slides away on a hillside of lose shale and takes everything in its path-dreams, opportunities, hopes. And youth. It takes that fastest of all.

As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.