Just the word fills Beverly with an unaccountable, schoolmarmish sort of rage. Forever, that's got to be bad math, right? Such terrifying math.
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...
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...
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,...
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...
How true can this sensation of unity really be if you need to leave everyone you care about to get it.
He was intelligent and healthy, but decent to a point that crippled him as a master of his home or an accumulator of wealth. Madelaine had once characterized him as standing on the edge of the mainstr...
For the duration of our friendship, we'd trade off roles like this: anchor and boat, beholder and beheld.
You had to really cultivate an ending. To get it to last, you had to kneel and tend to the burial ground, continuously firming your resolution.
They greyhound whine with her, distressed by her distress. Sometimes, in a traitorous fugue, the dog forgot to be unhappy and ran off to chase purple butterflies or murder shrew-mice, or to piss a joy...
The heron is painted a somber Madonna blue, my only criticism of it. Turquoise would have been my choice, I tell him. Turquoise is what that blue would look like if she divorced the night and went on...
Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn’t have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gaugin...
But in a dream I might get to see the part of the swamp where her body washed up, bloated and rippling, or where she escaped to, if the dream was beautiful.
A dog's love is forever. We expect infidelity from one another; we marvel at this one's ability to hold that one's interest for fifty, sixty years; perhaps some of us feel a secret contempt for monoga...
But I believe I met my mother there, in the final instant. Not her ghost but some vaster portion of her, her self boundlessly recharged beneath the water.
This idea appealed to me—I was a quiet kid myself, branded mean, and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.)
I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none.
Turn the lights of please, Ava, she whispered, and I remember her breath hot and rummy on our cheeks. To this day I think of rum as a marine smell; the scent of it on an adult's breath turned the worl...
Many of the presidents have sworn themselves in to similarly foolish titles: Governor of Cow Pastures, Commanding General of Standing Chickens.