THE ALLIGATOR IS AN ANACHRONISM THAT CAN EAT YOU!
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...
That's one difference between a bully and a hero, I guess: good aim.
She used to suffer these intense bouts of homesickness in her own bedroom. When she was very small, she would wake up tearing at her bedspread and shrieking, I wanna go home! I wanna go home! Which wa...
Just about everybody I've ever wanted to impress, I've now outlived.
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...
Our mother performed in starlight.
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.
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...
Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children. After
Words, I guess, are her more durable artifacts.
I dropped the candies into the children's bags, thinking: You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.
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...
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...
I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.
The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it.
It occurred to me that, given the life span of a moth, one kid’s twitch must take a year to complete.
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,...
At the Hoho’s Family Restaurant, Beverly treats herself to peanut butter pancakes and world news.
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...