I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do somethin...
She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her.
Not merely pretty, he decides. She is actually beautiful, but it’s a subtle kind of beauty that takes some time to make itself apparent.
Miranda opened her eyes in time to see the sunrise. A wash of violent color, pink and streaks of brilliant orange, the container ships on the horizon suspended between the blaze of the sky and the wat...
Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?I don't know. Maybe. Yes.Of course not. Imagine how many there'd be.Yes, Kirsten said, that's exactly it.
AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. N...
Then came a virus like an avenging angel, unsurvivable, a microbe that reduced the population of the fallen world by, what? There were no more statisticians by then, my angels, but shall we say ninety...
Mornings: he liked to read a novel while he ate breakfast. It was possibly the most civilized habit Clark had ever encountered.
They acted because they loved acting, but also, let’s be honest here, to be noticed. All they wanted was to be seen.
There’d been an epidemic, the man had told him. Thirty people had died incandescent with fever, including the mayor. After this, a change in management, but the tuba’s acquaintance had declined to ela...
There were a number of impractical shoes, stilettos mostly, beautiful and strange.
TWENTY YEARS AFTER the end of air travel, the caravans of the Traveling Symphony moved slowly under a white-hot sky.
She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these pe...
Outside the world was ending and snow continued to fall.
No,' Dahlia said, 'because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You kn...
No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room.
If nothing else, it’s pleasant to consider the possibility.
I wish I could tell you how sorry I am, Elizabeth says, but you’ve already told me to stop apologizing.It’s just an awful thing to do.I don’t think I’m an awful person, Elizabeth says.No one ever thin...
I like waitresses with tattoos. It implies the existene of a secret life.
I have walked all my life through this tarnished world.