Do you have any concept of what I’ve already sacrificed for you?
Day’ll come, when he’s grown and it’s too late, that you’d give a kingdom to go back and spend a single hour with your son as a boy. To hold him. Read a book to him. Throw a ball with a person in whos...
Considering what he’d been through in the last five days, rote hallucinations would’ve been a welcome return to sanity.
Can’t do this. There were tears in her voice now, her throat clogged with emotion.
But sometimes, like tonight, she feels plugged in to the raw emotion of it all, a closed circuit, and if she doesn't keep it at arm's length, it still has the power to break her.
Because no matter what had happened in the past, in this harrowing present, everybody needed everybody.
Are you losing your mind? You tell me. I can’t. Why? Because I am you.
And it’s the act of our observing the cat that kills it—or lets it live. And then it gets mind-fuckingly weird. Because those kinds of observations happen all the time. So if the world really splits w...
A terrifying spin on the Prisoner’s Dilemma that asks, Is it possible to outthink yourself?
Town, and the mule skinner knows that something is wrong. Two miles south stands Bartholomew Packer’s mine, the Godsend, a twenty-stamp mill that should be filling this box canyon with the
Pausing as the first radials of sunlight struck its translucent skin. Its progression down through the boulder field had been slow and careful, stopping occasionally to sniff the remains of others lik...
Midmorning. The sky steel blue and not a cloud in sight. His perch was atop a thirty-foot guard tower that had been built on the rocky pinnacle of a mountain, far above the timberline. From the open p...
You know how a dream feels the farther you get from it? It loses its color and intensity and logic. Your emotional connection to it fades.
Wind rips through the crags a thousand feet above, nothing moving in this godforsaken town, and the mule skinner knows that something is wrong. Two miles south stands Bartholomew Packer’s mine, the Go...
Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn't make sense at...
She turned onto her side and faced Lawrence. His breath warmed her face, and in that virgin dark, she caught his scent—a repressed relic from those precious years when he was Daddy, and not the remnan...
She cursed loud enough to attract the attention of an older man who’d dolled himself up for the evening, his eyes glaring at her over the top of the Asheville Citizen-Times. She slashed him with a sar...
She couldn’t help thinking this didn’t feel anything like she’d imagined it would. Having run countless versions of this moment through her head, they’d all carried more gravitas. She would scream at...
Randall inwardly raged about the stupidity of the building designers to not have included another way out of the office, then immediately decided that architects did not typically have homicidal monst...
Onto his side and pushed up into a sitting position, tucking his head between his knees. Sensed the instability of the world long before he opened his eyes, like its axis had been cut loose to teeter....