She hasn’t smoked in a while, managed to convince herself that smoking is disgusting, but it’s a pleasure, actually, more of a pleasure than she remembered. The lit end flares in the darkness when she...
Sasha found herself at a loss for words. What am I asking you? I'm asking you if I was complicit in something unspeakable, because Anna, Anna, I already carry so much.
RAYMONDE: What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.
It’s possible that no one who didn’t grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom.
It is sometimes necessary to break everything.
Incredible in retrospect, all of it, but especially the parts having to do with travel and communications. This was how he arrived in this airport: he’d boarded a machine that transported him at high...
In art school they talked about day jobs in tones of horror. She never would have imagined that her day job would be the calmest and least cluttered part of her life.
If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, traveling toward or awa...
I repent nothing. A line remembered from the fog of the Internet. I am heartless, she thinks, but she knows even through her guilt that this isn't true. She knows there are traps everywhere that can m...
I have walked all my life through this tarnished world. After she walked out of Toronto with her brother, after that first unremembered year, her brother had been plagued by nightmares. The road, he’d...
He’d been able to see reasonably well with an extremely thick pair of glasses, but he’d lost these six years ago and since then he’d lived in a confusing landscape distilled to pure color according to...
He was thinking of the book, and what Dahlia had said about sleepwalking, and a strange thought came to him: had Arthur seen that Clark was sleepwalking? Would this be in the letters to V.? Because he...
He was the second violin and a secret poet, which is to say that no one in the Symphony knew he wrote poetry except Kirsten and the seventh guitar.
He was half-naked in the bed, lying like a starfish. After she got up he always liked to see how much of the bed he could sleep on at once.
He stared at his crown and ran through a secret list of everything that was good.
He remembered being here with Clark at three or four or sometimes five in the morning, during what seemed at the time like adulthood and seemed in retrospect like a dream.
He had decided before the accident not to chase them anymore, but the circumstances of the accident made him fear for Lilia's safety. he would never bring her in, not anymore; all he wanted now was to...
Dieter walked a little ahead of the other actors, murmuring to his favourite horse. The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week.
Did I ever tell you about my last phone call? Garrett asked. Yes, Clark said gently. I believe you did. Garrett had had a wife and four-year-old twins in Halifax, but the last call he’d ever made was...
Being alive is a risk.