Stars slid away like rain, she was gone so long.
Our mother performed in starlight.
Kids were for later, maybe. They could still see the children they had been.
It's strange to own anything, Beverly thinks, even your flesh, that nobody outside yourself ever touches or sees.
I whispered to Ossie that I wanted to see the register for Death’s aeroplane. Who was boarding the plane in such a stupid order? The
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.
When you are a kid, it’s hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.
We didn’t talk about Eric Mutis, but the effort of not talking about him made our actual words feel like fizz, just a lot of speedy emptiness.
The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.
People talk about heredity as if it’s linear and vertical. Dead people pass things down to the young.
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...
It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams.
I had been eagerly waiting just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods-these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are.
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...
At ten, I couldn’t articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.
When you’re raising weather by artificial means, it’s hard to pretend you don’t have a hand in the change
Now her body was the only place where the memories were preserved.
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...
Live long enough, and your life becomes your own to gamble with again
It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.