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In the early 80’s I broke up with my cows. This is different from breaking up with a guy. You don’t watch a guy walk the plank into someone’s big cattle truck with those strangely delicate, vulnerable ankles, wondering whether he’ll ever get to go outside again or just be ...

I didn’t love the woman I married the way she loved me but according to my figuring compared to the alternatives: loneliness, pain, suffering, that would be alright. Specifically the alternative was, for me, chasing women that liked me, and were amused by me but for whom, when things got ...

Let me tell you about my heartbreak as a Shanghainese quarter-blood at age twelve in 1975. It was different from your average American girl’s. I knew little about the birds and the bees and never wondered about where the over 800 million navy blue-clad fellow citizens had come from. Never ...

We had been going out only a month when she began knitting a sweater. It was bluish-grey flecked, a pretty wool, and Sara was making for herself, she said, because she was tired of knitting things for other people
I accepted this with good grace. Whenever I go out ...

20 WINNERS

1) Christopher Wall, "The Size of the Room: A Personal Reconstruction"
2) Michael Stone: "I'm Okay, I'm Cursed"
3) Vivian Yang, "First Breakup Recalled"
4) Jeanne Wilkinson, "Ruminations on Ruminants/Breaking Up With Cows"
5) Rob ...

Part I:
This is a story about my unpleasant, largely tangential, involvement with a heartwarming television program and the end of a friendship. It involves most of the usual human material -- vanity, prevarication, open-mouthed fear, labyrinths of delusion, and long-distance calls from Los Angeles jangling with hysteria. Towards ...

Signs you should go to the emergency room: intense bloating in the abdominal region, followed by a burning sensation that lasts for hours; an intolerance to food or water; finally, a willingness to appear plain silly, pacing through the kitchen between moving boxes with your arms extended, cross-like, around a ...