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Divorce

A safe-deposit box, a black-and-white TV, a Christmas gift

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

On Sunday, Josselyn has promised herself, she will unpack. But on Sunday she’s hung over and depressed, and it’s at least a hundred degrees in the apartment.

Organicity

I was a daily drinker, a frequent opium user, and a bona fide cocaine addict. I was a devotee of Demerol and a dabbler in Darvocet. I was a Percodan-pursuing, Seconal-seeking, codeine-consuming, 100 percent, fully certifiable, equal-opportunity substance abuser.

Acrostic

The prison van passed through the ratty grounds, by the crumbling remains of the 1820s cellblocks and a burnt-out station wagon. The afternoon’s thick heat had turned into a yellow evening haze. Bright razor wire had curled like Christmas tinsel along walls, culverts, corners of buildings, up power poles. The Hudson River glittered at the bottom of the hill. I’d been told the inmates were expecting a new teacher. I’d be “obvious” — my age and sex and suburban neatness all crowded into one word. The prison buildings sat stubborn, old, and impenetrable. I still hadn’t seen an inmate.

Floating On The Darkness

He had tried to take my mother away from me, to leave me all alone. How different everything would have been without her. Suddenly it seemed as if she had always been with me, even when I was by myself, like that long cord that keeps astronauts from floating off into oblivion when they leave the spaceship.

Naked Before Strangers

My first strip jobs were down in Chicago, secretarial pools and bachelorette parties where the girls squealed and ran their hands along my abs and up over my pecs. My old man would shit one of his very own bricks if he ever found out what I do.

Doctors

A misdiagnosis; a long, wet kiss; a ring from the garden

Sunbeams

There is something that happens between men and women in the dark that seems to make everything else unimportant.

Tennessee Williams

Monogamy

Wife-swapping, ten fucks, a master’s thesis in comparative literature

Marriage Is Impossible

To begin with, marriage is an impossible topic of conversation. Just try to put into words what makes a friend’s marriage work — never mind your own. It’s impossible to fully describe, much less arrive at a consensus about. Marriage is a subject sure to disrupt most dinner parties. Ultimately a product of the human imagination, it appears in countless forms and varieties. For reformers and many feminists, marriage is oppression and legalized rape, while right-wing fundamentalists (Christian, Muslim, and otherwise) see heterosexual marriage as an act of salvation for civilization.