5 MWE--the mascot's wand was the miracle drunk

A corner could have had paste in it. It did not have a vegetable meal in it. A yellow vegetable meal. The corner was what we wanted to include in a stew, so we removed it with a saw. A hollow with an eel in it. I put my heel in a hollow and had it bitten by an eel. I buried the dead eel, so that, months later, I would be able to recover its skeleton.

This was me coming into being with another person. I inchoated my throat. I inchoated around her, but, ultimately, it didn't matter. I believed I had new veins in my feet, so I went to the doctor. He said he did not see them and that I looked healthy for a 27-year-old man. (Spell out all numbers less than 100.) Next, I felt as though a vein in my scrotum felt strange. So I went to the doctor and had him rummage around. He rolled the vein between his fingers. I told him it was a dull pain. I told him it was a pain that could be described as the end of a pencil I'd been using for over a month. I had used the pencil to edit student compositions because I believed the pencil to me more respectful than the pen. "They can erase it", I thought. (The comma should go inside the quotation mark.) The doctor told me to take 3 Advil a day and to try some generic antibiotic.

I told her the veins in my hands had changed color, but she didn't believe me. I told her small red dots appeared on my arms and disappeared. I thought maybe hot water caused it? I told him that I believed wind--but only cold wind--made me smell strange. He smelled me. I said, "But there's no cold wind in here." I was what the teacher called a prime student. He believed I could have done my Ph.D at Princeton--that they would have been happy to have me. He said I chose the wrong thing. He was surprised I was not on my way to Mississippi. At times, he could be succinct. Times, he could be terse. He could end a conversation early because, he claimed, I had exhausted him with all my non-complaints. He told me not to be dumb but more distinct with my silence. Maybe wear a hat you can fold and put in your sock, he told me. I was coming into being--but not in a way that reassured anyone around me. I was inchoating in such a way that I was sure I smelled strange if out in the cold. I thought lots of magnesium would get rid of the smell. Or rolling in a patch of mint. Or drinking so much water with cayenne pepper in it. I told her to slide me in the calcinatory once I got off to sleep. She said I ground my teeth when I didn't wear my mouthpiece. I had made one for myself out of papier mache.

I had dulled my knife cutting packing tape. I sprinkled dill weed into soup. I went in with my sister to buy a fence for a dog. I did not go to sleep because my friend was sleeping on the floor next to me. We told a story about a pig. I would cook myself in water almost too hot to sit in. I believed in the diuretic ipecac because it was what the historian spoke of at not the lecture but the carnival. I smelled like a monk's cell, my mother said. The doctor could not wear latex gloves because he was allergic to them. Jesse James said of my grandfather, "Who is that boy?" And then, his brother Frank, to him: "That is just a kid." My grandfather, Delos, was the first to have an x-ray machine. But I had to borrow a dime. But I had to swallow a dime. These are chocolate-covered dimes for children. The mass in her calf--that clot of green veins--was lithoid. I took it to my sewn pocket only to remember that my pocket had been sewn shut by my mother. If I sang, I didn't stutter. If I spelled the words