The lesson of this life is not for me to touch you again. It is to accept who I am now and not feel shame.
The circus tent was flowing pale in the rain like a fleshy flower lit from within. It seemed to bloom in the downpour. Drops of rain caught on Rafe's eyelashes, blinding him as the circus light struck...
Sometimes you fall, spinning through space, grasping for the things that keep you on this earth. Sometimes you catch them. They can be the hands of the people you love. They can be your pets- pups wit...
She felt their envy and this broke her. The story ended, she couldn’t tell the rest, they’d hate her, she had to stop, she wasn’t any good, shut up you bad, bad, bad ugly girl and you don’t deserve an...
Same old boring boring story America can’t stop telling itself. What is this sicko fascination? Every book and movie practically has to have a little, right? But why do you think all those runaways ar...
NightingaleDid I wound you, mutilate. Take away your voice. Did I cut something from you. Leave you locked in silence?This is what you do: you sing. Every part of you. Your locks of hair sing, your ey...
Love is the worst earthquake there is. Can crush you to the thickness of your bones. Love can be like cancer sometimes. Terminal. It can make you vomit. It can make you want to cut it out. It can take...
Like Beauty. But she only pricked her finger. I had a spindle through my heart.
I close my eyes. I am the visionary, the one-eyed seer, the storyteller. I am Pen. I can fight with the power of images and words.
Barbie was no longer afraid of anything. It was like the thing Mab had said about belief. The belief is sometimes the biggest part of it all. You can choose to believe in your published book being hel...
Ash swirls in the air and the landscape is gray rubble that falls away into the sea. They kept saying global warming wan't going to be the end of us, that it was just threats from the fanatics, that w...
Are you? What? What you once were?I can't remember.
Air. I am still holding the scissors, pointing
When someone so young and lovely vanishes they leave a cutout in the atmosphere; they don't fade. They leave a place for the sun rays to cut through and burn us, melt all the important ice to floods.
The happier you are, the less you need.
No, I’m all right. I think I’m just over-stimulated or something.Do you want to explain that one to me? Do we need to take you to buy some condoms?Mom! No.
It’s so sick, Duck said. I nicked myself shaving that last night at home, and I saw my own blood and I thought, How could I live in a world where this exists—where love can become death? Even if the d...
If you made up a city like this, no one would have believed you. It seemed more like myth than reality- a whole metropolis built up around an industry that recorded dreams on giant screens, a city bor...
If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model with collagen-puffed lips and silicone-inflated breasts, a woman in a magenta convertible with heart-shaped sunglasses and cotton candy hair; if Los...
I want to be untouchable and beautiful and completely dead inside.