Those clothes are Susie's,' my father said calmly when he reached him.Buckley looked down at my blackwatch dress that he held in his hand.My father stepped closer, took the dress from my brother, and...
There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.
Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.
She could shut out the whole world, including herself.
In the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway
I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.
I was not in the bathroom, in the tub, or in the spigot; I did not hold court in the mirror above her head or stand in miniature at the tip of every bristle on Lindsey's or Buckley's toothbrush. In so...
Do you ever think of her?' she asked.They were quiet again. All the time,' Ruth said. A chill ran down my spine. 'Sometimes I think she's lucky, you know. I hate this place.'Me too,' Ray said. 'But I'...
By December 1975, a year had passed since Mr. Harvey had packed his bags, but there was still no sign of him. For a while, until the tape dirtied or the paper tore, store owners kept a scratchy sketch...
As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.
As if in the other side of his kiss there could ve a new life
After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at m...
You look invincible,' my mother said one night.I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said:I am.
You don't notice the dead leaving when they really hoose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down.
When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way.A heart that flashed from heart to strone, heart to stone.
To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a solution, I knew. Houses had windows with shades. Yards had gates and fences. There were carefully planned out sidewalks an...
This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one
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...
These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. 'Inside, inside,' she would whisper quietly to herself when...
The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see...