Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.
Samuel walked out to Lindsey then, and there she was in his arms, my sweet butterball babe, born ten years after my fourteen years on Earth: Abigail Suzanne. Little Susie to me. Samuel placed Susie on...
I now think that was distanced me from Tricia and from the Rape Crisis Center was their use of generalities. I did not want to be one of a group or compared with others. It somehow blindsided my sense...
Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.
I forgive you, I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.
And as Flora twirled, other girls and women came through the field in all directions. Our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup. Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the sma...
What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meantgone.
I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 P.M.
But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.
There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.
Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.
He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.
After a few days in heaven, I realized that the javelin-throwers and the shot-putters and the boys who played basketball on the cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven. Theirs just fi...
When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things, Franny said. What about the dead? I asked. Where do we go?
Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.
In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dis...
We stood-- the dead child and the living --on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forever. To please us both was an impossibility.
My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.
Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.
Do you know how alone I've always felt?