She thought of sex as the Star Trek transport.You vaporized and found yourself navigating another planet within the second or two it took to realign.
Ruth hadn't talked to my sister since before my death,and then it was only to excuse herself in the hallway atschool. But she'd seen Lindsey walking home with Samuel andseen her smile with him. She wa...
Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn’t calculate my steps. I didn’t have time for contemplation. In violence it is the getting out that you concentrate on. When you begin...
My grandmother stepped back into the kitchen to get their drinks. I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to...
My father had not been outside the house except to drive back and forth to work or sit out in the backyard, for months, nor had he seen his neighbors. Now he looked at them, from face to face, until h...
It was then that I slipped in the darkness, unable to know if I could be seen.I made myself small in the darkness, unable to know if I could be seen. I had left for hours every day for eight and a hal...
If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling, you can be free. Simply put, you...
If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.
I would do exactly what you are doing: I would talk to everyone I needed to, I would not tell too many people his name. When I was sure, she said, I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.
I watched my beautiful sister running . . . and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a sc...
I left my mark on that man.
I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones.
He took the hat from my mouth. ''Tell me you love me'', he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway
But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out
But I know I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead — in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death — the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of...
Buckley followed the three of them into the kitchen and asked, as he had at least once a day, Where’s Susie?They were silent. Samuel looked at Lindsey.Buckley, my father called from the adjoining room...
Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger on...
At the tips of the feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light....still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm...
At Evensong one night, while Holly played at sax and Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer joined in, I saw him: Holiday, racing past a fluffy white Samoyed. He had lived to a ripe old age on earth and slept at my fat...
As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.