What this good man had sworn to protect me from was not the same as what I feared. I trusted that he would never let anything hurt me, but he would never let anything touch me either.
Wasn't it so often the girl --no matter how young-- who got blamed for having incited her molester with a look?
Was that hard-hearted? Well, so what if it was. She'd been through enough to harden anyone. It was none of her choosing; all she'd done was clung on to her life like a spar from a shipwreck. Better to...
The lightest touch might keep Mary there, rooted in this frozen alley. Instead, she stretched out her hand to the worn red ribbon in Doll's wig. Was it the same one, she wondered, the first one, the r...
Somewhere between good and bad - bits of both stuck together.Ma
So they're fake?No, no. Stories are a different kind of true.
She leaped into space, high, higher than she'd ever been in her life. She came down with a clean snap, and the crowd scattered like birds from the swing of her feet.
Scared is what you're feeling, says Ma, but brave is what you're doing.
Not beautiful, not brilliant, no longer young.
My eyes dawdled across the missalette. I had never noticed before that the official title of the ‘Lord have mercy’ prayer was the gracious phrase ‘Invitation to Sorrow’. Hey there, Sorrow, how’ve you...
Little by little; the way out of the mine was as long as the way in.
It's called mind over matter. If we don't mind, it doesn't matter.
It stands to reason that those who assault nature will suffer at her hands in the end.
In my experience of ward nursing, two shifts are more conducive to sleep than three. But
I think buddy is man talk for sweetie.
I have tried to use memory and invention together, like two hands engaged in the same muddy work of digging up the past.
Goodbye, Room. I wave up at Skylight. Say goodbye, I tell Ma. Goodbye, Room.Ma says it but on mute.I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the do...
Change for your own sake, if you must, not for what you imagine another will ask of you.
At the balls he took me to there were many beautiful young women who didn't say a word. They answered every question with a shrug or a smile. If champagne got spilt down their dresses they only sighed...
Was interesting. Is that what your ma says to say when you don’t like something? She smiles a bit. I taught her that. Is she dying by now?