Me Talk Pretty One Day: List 2

Along with grits and hush puppies, the abbreviated form of you all was a dangerous step on an insidious path leading straight to the doors of the Baptist church.

Telephone solicitors frequently ask to speak to our husbands or request that we put our mommies on the line.

The Raleigh accent is soft and beautifully cadenced, but my brother's is a more complex hybrid, informed by his professional relationships with marble-mouthed, deep-country work crews and his abiding love of hard-core rap music.

The Raleigh accent is soft and beautifully cadenced, but my brother's is a more complex hybrid, informed by his professional relationships with marble-mouthed, deep-country work crews and his abiding love of hard-core rap music.

My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering she has hatched a completely different species.

Oh, you know. It's a base, vernacular word...

He prefers money as a concept and often uses terms such as annuity and fiduciary, words definitely not listed in the dictionary of mindless entertainment.

There had been some encounter at a bar, but the details were sketchy.

Evenings were spent at the animal hospital, lying on a mat outside of her cage and adjusting her IV. He'd never afforded her much attention when she was healthy, but her impending death awoke in him a great sense of duty.

With us grown and out of the house, my sisters and I reasonably expected our parents' lives to stand still. Their assignment was to stagnate and live in the past.

Her interests broadened and she listened intently to the radio, captivated by the political and financial stories, which failed to engage me.

Her kidneys shrank to the size of raisins, and although I wanted what was best for her, I naturally assumed the vet was joking when he suggested dialysis. In addition to being elderly, toothless, and incontinent, it seemed that, for the cost of a few thousand dollars, she could also spend three days a week hooked up to a machine.

Vet number two tested her blood and phoned me a few days later suggesting I consider euthanasia.

His friend, a gaunt and serious boy named Komatsu, stood below him, offering encouragement.

Neil had gotten into her cat carrier believing she would eventually return to our apartment, and that tore me up. Someone had finally been naive enough to trust me, and I'd rewarded her with death.

When walking Sophie through the neighborhood, my father feels not unlike the newly married senior stumbling behind his capricious young bride.

The puppy’s stamina embarrasses him, as does her blatant interest in young men.

Sometimes I’d give myself an aggressive voice and firm, athletic timbre.

The asthmatic transferred to another class, leaving me with only eight students. Of these, four were seasoned smokers who took long, contemplative drags and occasionally demonstrated their proficiency by blowing ghostly concentric rings that hovered like halos above their bowed heads.

The group set to work with genuine purpose and enthusiasm, and I felt proud of myself, until the quietest member of the class handed in her paper, whispering that both her father and her uncle were currently serving time on federal racketeering charges.

On General Hospital or Guiding Light a similar story might come off as trite or even laughable.

Come critique time, most students behaved as if the assignment had been to confine the stories in a dark, enclosed area and test their reaction to sensory deprivation.

The student might mumble, pointing to the bloodied cotton wad packed against his swollen gum, and I'd ask, “When did you decide that your character should seek treatment for his impacted molar?"

Trouble arose only when authors used their stories to vindicate themselves against a great hurt or perceived injustice.

She lit a cigarette and spent a moment identifying with the smoldering match.

The house was furnished with broken tables and chairs she'd picked up off the street, and every service was haggled over.

If a cabdriver charged her four dollars, she'd wrangle him down to three.

Valencia's business was a small publishing company she ran from her garishly painted fourth-floor study.

Occasionally these poets would show up drunk, carrying found objects onto which they had scrawled cryptic messages.

I looked through the open window, where, standing on the branch of a ginkgo tree, a male pigeon was examining his misshapen foot.

I thought once more of my bounced paychecks and realized that had this been the actual parrot, she would have found some way to renege on the deal and change the split from the promised fifty-fifty.

Rego Park, Bayside, Harlem, Coney Island, the job introduced me to the various neighborhoods of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs.

Their new, higher rents meant that they'd have to cut back on their spending, to work longer hours, or try to wean themselves off their costly psychiatrists.

It might have been an old story to Patrick and the others, but I got a kick out of being mistaken as volatile.

I began to change in subtle ways and quickly lost patience with people who owned too many books. What had once seemed an honorable inclination now struck me as a heavy and inconvenient affectation.

Standing in their new apartments, the air noxious with the smell of paint, the customers would determine the order of their new lives.

It was my understanding that communists preferred beefy, corn-fed girls with thick ankles and strong backs, all the better for threshing wheat and lugging heavy sacks of rice.

Patrick would throw back his head and let out his hearty communist laugh, an extended bray that suggested I was young and could not yet tell the difference between good money and bad.

Maybe he felt those men looking at his teeth and thinking him a loser. In their great, tenacious drive to succeed, perhaps Patrick saw the futility of his own struggle.

Maybe he felt those men looking at his teeth and thinking him a loser. In their great, tenacious drive to succeed, perhaps Patrick saw the futility of his own struggle.