The thing about the shape of a bee, which might be why it is often drawn curved around a flower with the black head bowed over the thorax and the knees tucked in lovely and benign as a comma, lucent wings arching from stripes furred to catch pollen blurring with light, is that the shape of the bee is like the honey it makes, sweet, healing, golden-lit from within such that a bee fallen dead on the rug or balled along the base of a window frame still holds the comma shape, and while it may be that

Always they find us inappropriate, but today especially so. Here we are with nowhere to go and nothing to do, sitting in a rusty pickup truck, the one leaking oil, the one with the busted transmission that sounds like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Here we are with the engine running for the AC, the doors wide open for our bare legs to spill out. Because this, right here, to survive the heat, this is all we have.

My wife, my daughter, and I live on the bluff overlooking the river. The river is wide, and it is swarming with crocodiles and hippos. Courtesy of our unique ecosystem, they have developed a taste for each other’s flesh, and some days the banks are thick with pink froth. Sometimes the crocodiles are up, sometimes the hippos. It’s your standard vicious cycle.

He weighed 210 pounds buck-ass naked; 217 in his leather jacket and boots, which he wore that crisp March evening to the bar along with a gold pin in his lapel. It was shaped like a spade, a gift from his wife when they were young, once she’d discovered how much he liked expensive-looking things. 

Olgi says she’s going to take me somewhere and show me something I’ve never seen before. We walk through a door into an inner courtyard, then from there into another one, then into a third one, where there is a wire fence. Olgi knows where the fence can be lifted, she picks it up, holds it, I slip through, then I hold it up while she slips through the fence.

In the year of our Lord 687, in cause of an early, wet spring, the body of Saint Cuthbert was laid in the ground to rest. On the tomb were figured angels and seraphim of plain but wonderful design. And among these flitted cherubs, like apricots set into the stone. Thus carved, the tomb was set upon a patch of ground a low word’s reach from the road, where wild grass grew and flowering thyme.

All my life I have been trying to improve my German.
At last my German is better

The left hand prides itself on being more refined than the right hand. Yes, it is in fact a little slimmer, the knuckles are not as knobbly, and the skin is even a little smoother. But, says the right hand calmly, think of all the work I’ve done that you haven’t, over the years. Well, says the left, I’ve been there alongside you all the way, helping. But think of all the things you can’t do that I can, says the right. Think of all the skills I’ve developed.

She is feeling out of control and uncomfortable in her body (she is pregnant). He becomes annoyed: “You’re always calling attention to yourself. I have a very tough week ahead of me.”

During the week of October 24, 1846, George Holcomb’s turnip harvest was at its height. With his family and others, he pulled turnips on several days, sometimes topping them and sometimes leaving the tops on. He also began trading his turnips for goods and services, including: