I'm not going anywhere, she told me that night. But until we are old ladies--a cypress age, a Sawtooth age--I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.
I dropped the candies into the children's bags, thinking: You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.
The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it.
It's go time.' He takes my elbow and gentles me down the planks with such tenderness that I am suddenly very afraid. But there's no sense making the plunge slow and unbearable. I take a running leap d...
I ignored her and continued down the hall. I had only four more hours to perfect the Sausalito. I was worried only about myself. By that stage, I was no longer certain of how the pack felt about anyth...
Even at this altitude, the substitute pilot's bathed in sweat, sweat running down his chin and neck. Fear must be the fountain of youth, because the substitute pilot now looks younger than any of us,...
But her favorite is the Houdini fantasy. Big Red disagrees with his biographers, who say that he was driven by his longing to shuck off this mortal coil. She knows that he was all the time just search...
It occurred to me that, given the life span of a moth, one kid’s twitch must take a year to complete.
This strain of virulent misery, this falling out of love, caused different symptoms, unique disruptions, in dogs and humans.
At the Hoho’s Family Restaurant, Beverly treats herself to peanut butter pancakes and world news.
Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love t...
Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.
There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshin...
People are symptoms of dreams
Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.
Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children. After
It's our suspicion that there's another, better Heaven behind the cumulus screen,' he murmurs into the grass, bending and tearing at a root that tastes beautifully yellow. 'That's the trouble. That's...
I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.
Even in her trances, even while possessed, my sister was very shrewd about her prospects. A fantasy would collapse like a wave against the rocks of her intelligence. Madness, as I understood it from b...
I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.