Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.
Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.
Look what happens when we dream.
Heaven wasn't perfect.
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...
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...
I was like I was in science class: I was curious.
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?
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.
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see...
Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose to tell it, even to one person...
My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.
I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his deck, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began...
I realized then that they would not know when I was gone, just as they could not know how heavily I hovered in a particular room. Buckley had talked to me and I had talked back. Even if I hadn't thoug...
He had been my almost. My might-have-been.I was afraid of what I wanted most - His kiss. Still, I collected kiss stories. -Susie Salmon
At fourteen my sister sailed away from me into a place I'd never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.
The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engage...
I could not imagine my youngest standing above her soiled grandmother in the wing chair and saying, "mother, let's kill her. "That's the only choice.
You're dead and you have to accept it.
Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?