5MWE

We had a parrot. The parrot had a bell. The parrot removed the clapper--Is clapper the right word?--from the bell. The parrot would wear the clapperless bell on its head. I had an awful friend. I had a lawful friend. My friend and I took his cat. First, we tied a rope to a bucket. We put his cat in the bucket and then we swung the bucket over our heads. Around and around, and the cat couldn't get out because of the circle force. The force of the circle. It's pi that makes it go round. Just take some string, dye it black, and there you have your mustache. When I was 8, I went to kindergarten with a mustache. I was not allowed to go to kindergarten when I was five or six. I wasn't allowed to go when I was seven. I had to wait until I was eight. The school was near a graveyard, and I would often recruit other children to sneak with me into it and take stones. We would drag the stones back to the school. We would hit the heads and hands off angels. At the bar, we had to keep a carton of beef broth because there was a man who came in who liked to drink beef broth with vodka. The floor is sticky. The sticky end of the mattress floated into oblivion because it was lighter than the softest oats. I had taken to eating lots of chicken. I would blend up two pounds of chicken with 12 ounces of warm water and gag through it. Spend most of my morning drinking that mix in the broken squad car. Give me some whiskey--at least in my dreams.

Number of sentences. Longest sentence. Shortest sentence. Average sentence length. Percentage of sentences that start with an intro clause. Percentage that end with a clause. Percentage that start with a phrase. Percentage that end with a phrase. Percentage with a phrase in the middle. Let me tell you this. Let me pester you with a poke. Here comes a poke. Here comes me scratching at your shoulder. I was glad all at the top, and I sang. At the top of a sycamore. Sycamore was sick. Sycamore would pick at my face, even when I told her not to pick at my face. I had old scars on my forehead and in my jowls. I had old scars at the back of my jaws and under my ears. Old scars. I remember thinking that if I imagined the smooth marble foreheads of statues, then maybe my face would clear up. Applying things that make it tight can ruin a sunset, especially if you're sitting on a deck whose fumes are making you high in the last time of your only obsolescence. Schism. Smite. Strike. Pass me the mallet so that I can squint into some light and ask if the sound is okay. How is the sound over there? Picking at my face. Wanting to put swabs in my ear when they are not for cleaning ears. Marigolds to keep away the bugs. Beets for boiling. The foundry was next to the museum, and as a result, it was hard to keep it clean. What is it. It is an infested truck that is stuck on the end of a marble hostess.

My father forced me to wear a cup daily. I would come downstairs, and he'd be waiting for me. He had a wooden mallet, which he would use to tap at my groin. He wanted to make sure I was wearing my cup every day. An everyday cup. I wore it every day, so it was an everyday cup. The difference between an adverb and an adjective is not something that I can always inhabit, though, when I was much older I was a soldier in the ocean, pitting myself against the seashore. When I was much older, I had my hands pounded flat until they were flippers. I was lustful when I was much older. I listed. I careened. I careered. I foundered because I did not see the reef. The reef was dead and had many eels in it. My sister was sitting at the end of a dock. There were old tires tied to the end of the dock, and my sister put her foot into one of them. An eel was in that tire. It bit her foot and would not let go. My father had to chop the eel's body from its head. It is hard to see where its head ends. Since my mother had a husband, and since her husband had a mother, and since that mother of his--that mother of my mother's husband--could not be approached under any circumstance, I often found myself finding hopeful mothers in the grocery store, the grocery store where I stocked the frozen food without gloves, where I stocked the peanut butter next to the Fluff, where I often took my breaks only to listen to someone else talk about guns and the price of holding his sister underwater until she departed this planet for another. She has said it's much nicer at the other.