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...
I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings.
His words hung around, too, leaving their brain stain on the air.
Beverly pushes down and down and down into the muscles under his tattoo to release the knots.
America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to som...
Whatever song we are making in this place, we are going to die without hearing.
What a stupid innovation! Skate blades. Indoor lakes. It had a perverse, fairy-tale logic, I thought, tying knives to your feet and carving out over frozen water.
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...
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...
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...
On the fifth night of our search, I see a plesiosaur. It is a megawatt behemoth, bronze and blue-white, streaking across the sea floor like a torpid comet. Watching it, I get this primordial deja vu,...
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...
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 think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulate than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in the 'The Spiritist's Telegraph.' Mothers burning inside the risen suns of thei...
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...
Her name in a stranger's mouth was a resurrection; however briefly, she was alive with him again again. Even that little shove could roll back the tomb.
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 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...