Some people we glimpse as chasms, briefly but deeply, even to the death of us. Others are shallow places you never seem to get across.
Sands vanquished a rush of fear and said emphatically, I’m your man, sir. Get in there. Have intercourse with snakes. Eat human flesh. Learn everything. That’s pretty broad.
Or maybe that wasn't the time it snowed. Maybe it was the time we slept in the truck and I rolled over on the bunnies and flattened them. It doesn't matter. What's important for me to remember now is...
Once in a while I lie there, as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folktales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wis...
Now the colonel seemed to grieve for his President again, because he said, This world spits out a beautiful man like he was poison.
I was a whimpering dog inside, nothing more than that. I looked for work because people seemed to believe I should look for work, and when I found a job I believed I was happy about it because these s...
Howling, are you? the Indian said. There it is for you, then. That’s what happens, that’s what they say: There’s not a wolf alive that can’t tame a man.
His elbows cracked loudly when he straightened his arms, and something hitched and snapped in his right shoulder when he moved it the wrong way; a general stiffness of his frame worked itself out by h...
Grainier still went to services some rare times, when a trip to town coincided. People spoke nicely to him there, people recognized him from the days when he'd attended almost regularly with Gladys, b...
Gladys had seen all of this, and she made it his to know. She'd lost her future to death, and lost her child to life.
Frost had built on the dead grass, and it skirled beneath his feet. If not for this sound he’d have thought himself struck deaf, owing to the magnitude of the surrounding silence. All the night’s nois...
Cherry Loot told Sergeant Burke, I’m gonna make the best of this fuck-a-monkey show. Don’t mean fuck to me if it’s illegal, unjustified, and sinful. Today we’re heroes, tomorrow we’re the Nazis. You n...
But in the deep red event behind the stove’s glass window the filament of time was never tangled, nothing had a name or a reason, everything was itself, and the things she would always know, even if y...
All night the dreamer travels in this region and doesn’t realize he’s asleep. The differences between the logic of that world and the logic of this waking one are vast. But they feel the same. And isn...
I felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities.
Well, you were sad about the kids for a while, for a month, two months, three months. You’re sad about the kids, sad about the animals, you don’t do the women, you don’t kill the animals, but after th...
We Vietnamese have two philosophies to sustain us. The Confucian tells us how to behave when fate grants us peace and order. The Buddhist trains us to accept our fate even when it brings us blood and...
This wasn't the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a...
They ran a few syringesful into me, and I felt like I’d turned from a light, Styrofoam thing into a person. I held up my hands before my eyes. The hands were as still as a sculpture’s.
There’s nothing wrong with me—I’m surprised I let those words out. But it’s always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.