ole, the tall, creamy, coffee-skinned hunk at the Salvation Army soup kitchen, is smiling at Delores. She has gone up to the window and asked for another doughnut and he is giving her one, right in front of God and everybody.

Every Tuesday, Mrs. Alligator Shoes brings in three boxes of hot Krispy Kremes, her fruity perfume blending with the smell of sugar and freshly cooked dough, and though Cole has made it clear that all of us in the Tuesday night crowd can have only one, he’s got to be kidding. Giving us just one of those sweet babies – that melts in our mouths way too fast – is like handing a kid an ice cream cone and telling him he can only have one bite. (more…)

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e says she has his heart. She keeps it in a jar beside her bed. It glows in the dark. It sings like a caged bird in the morning. Sometimes she shaves the thinnest slices from it to fry with her salty scrambled eggs. Then it is silent for days afterwards.

One afternoon he ran into her at one of the mega-bookstores downtown, buying a pile of magazines he was convinced she had no time to read. He cornered her at the candy counter. She was wearing a yellow sundress. Her hair was pulled back in tortoiseshell barrettes. She was as beautiful as ever.

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ddiction was hard. At a relatively young age, she had already become fairly intimate with several forms of addiction. Coffee was one of them – it was a daily ritual. Without it she became grumpy. Sometimes she purposely drank too much coffee to feel the caffeinated buzz – like pins and needles in her skull. It felt good.

But Him – she loved. Him – she needed, and when she didn’t have Him she craved Him, like a captive, wild horse craving freedom. It burst inside her and spread through her body. Little impulses and desires tried to punch through her pores and escape. They tried to be relieved. she had to hold them in. They couldn’t escape without Him there was nowhere to go. And she missed Him. she missed Him so much, and when she missed Him the earth pulled away from her and she was left suddenly and completely unsupported. her legs defied gravity, as if someone had pulled a rug out from underneath her feet. she felt no longer safe. she thought: “i might see Him soon,” and the possibility was slight, but comforting.

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he confession hadn’t made the investigation any easier. The deputies took Sonny Howell out to the bottoms to try to find the body. Sheriff Wilson Underwood had been under subpoena that day in federal court in Jonesboro and did not arrive until late in the afternoon. When he got to the Hatchie Coon Bottoms, Sonny still hadn’t shown the deputies where he’d hid the body.

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Richard Wagner recontextualized:

Letters to and from Aleppo Spontini

bstract. The recent discovery of several letters between Richard Wagner and Aleppo Spontini has sparked interest in the lifelong relationship the two men had. Who was Spontini, and what made a man whose elbow was always wet worth Wagner’s time? Wagner divulged some of his most personal feelings in his letters to Spontini. In addition to resolving the mystery surrounding the first Italian production of Tannhäuser, these intimate correspondences have illuminated our understanding of one of the greatest composers of all time.

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