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 dropped the candies into the children's bags, thinking: You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.
There is a rustle of dead leaves. Dried sap, a branch crack, the whirring teeth of Mr. Omaru's saw. My father--my real father--is a limb that got axed off the family tree a long time ago now. My mothe...
Just about everybody I've ever wanted to impress, I've now outlived.
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...
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...
Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.
The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it.
Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.
Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children. After
This strain of virulent misery, this falling out of love, caused different symptoms, unique disruptions, in dogs and humans.
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...
Stars slid away like rain, she was gone so long.
It occurred to me that, given the life span of a moth, one kid’s twitch must take a year to complete.
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.
I could have warned her. If we were back home, and Mirabella had come under attack by territorial beavers or snow-blind bears, I would have warned her. But the truth is that by Stage 3 I wanted her go...
The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.
Our mother, in several beautiful ways, may have been a little crazy. For example: who dries their clothing with a hurricane coming? Like Ossie, Mom got distracted easily. It was seventy-thirty odds wh...
No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving...