Una volta Beverly ha letto un articolo di una rivista scientifica sulla bioluminescenza, il bagliore naturale emesso da organismi come le lucciole e le meduse, ma sa che anche i morti emanano una stra...
Touch me again, Bird Man, I thought urgently. Tell a joke, say anything -- because I was having the convection feeling. As if my skin were rippling, dissolving. Kiwi describes this phenomenon, convect...
This new happiness had angles. Happiness like his was real; it had a jewel-cut shadow, and he could lose it.
The same spine that has been inside her since babyhood is hers today, the exact same bones from the womb, a thought that always fills her with a kind of thrilling claustrophobia. So much surface wrapp...
She doesn't know how to answer the man's question about why she snuck into the conch. She just feels like there's something she needs to protect. Some larval understanding, something cocooned inside h...
Often I wonder to what extent a mortal’s love grows from the bedrock of his or her foreknowledge of death, love coiling like a green stem out of that blankness in a way I’ll never quite understand. An...
Mr. Oamaru has taught me that loss isn't just limited to the present; it can happen in any direction. Even what's done and vanished can be taken from you. Other, earlier memories that we made of my fa...
March 1. DEAR BABY: I like the way you turn in half circles on the mattress, like a senile clock.
If they heard Death mounting the stairs at night, footsteps that the teenage Beverly swore she could feel vibrating through the floorboards at three a.m., nobody mentioned this intrusion at breakfast.
I wish I could say I gulp pure courage as I run, like those brave little girls you read about in stories, ... But this burst of speed comes from an older adrenaline, some limbic other. Not courage, bu...
I see nobody on the road, said Alice. I only wish that I had such eyes, the King remarked in a fretful tone. To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see re...
I pace along the edge of the marsh, too afraid to follow her, not for the first time. This is it, this is the geographical limit of how far I’ll go for Ossie. We are learning latitude and longitude in...
Heaven would be a comfy armchair….You’d get a great, private phonograph, and all of eternity to listen to your life’s melody. You could isolate your one life out of the cacophonous galaxy—the a cappel...
But the desert offers something that no forest, brook or valley ever can: distance. A cloudless rooming house for couples. Skies that will host any visitors' dreams with the bald hospitality of pure s...
Beverly pushes down and down and down into the muscles under his tattoo to release the knots.
Beverly once read a science magazine article about bioluminescence, the natural glow emitted by organisms like fireflies and jellyfish, but she knows the dead also give off a strange illumination, a p...
Just the word fills Beverly with an unaccountable, schoolmarmish sort of rage. Forever, that's got to be bad math, right? Such terrifying math.
I think that different pleasures work for different readers - a friend of mine won't read anything that's not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot, but I'm a sucker for...
There are twenty-two stalls in the Barn. Eleven of the stabled horses are, as far as Rutherford can ascertain, former presidents of the United States of America. The other stalls are occupied by regul...
Overhead, the glass envelope of the Insomnia Balloon is malfunctioning. It blinks on and off at arrhythmic intervals, making the world go gray:b lack, gray: black. In the distance, a knot of twisted t...