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...
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
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...
How could you make a mistake when you had one option?
Help! she screams to a sky full of crows. He’s not actually from Europe!
When you are a kid, it’s hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.
People talk about heredity as if it’s linear and vertical. Dead people pass things down to the young.
Overhead, the glass envelope of the Insomnia Balloon is malfunctioning. It blinks on and off at arrhythmic intervals, making the world go gray:black, gray:black. In the distance, a knot of twisted tre...
It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams.
I often think, that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.
As a kid I heard the word malignancy as Malig-Nancy like an evil woman's name, no matter how many times Kiwi and the Chief and Dr. Gautman himself corrected me. Our mother had mistaken her first sympt...
Now I'll read anytime, anywhere. I love reading in front of the space heater. Isn't that a sad confession? But it's like my substitute for the roaring fireplace of yore.
When you’re raising weather by artificial means, it’s hard to pretend you don’t have a hand in the change
The horses have been trying to get hold of the girl’s schoolbooks for some time. Every president wants to find out how history regards him.
Sometimes you are able to keep moving because you are not really yourself anymore. Your entire brain can shrink to one pinhead of cognition, one star in a night. I was acquainted with it, this bright...
People with options feel torn. People with options feel pulled, tugged - people who can move in multiple directions. Whereas those without homes are often immobilized by illness and poverty and additi...
My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.
I look for my sister but it's hopeless. The goggles are all fogged up. Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can't tell the living from the dead. It's all just blurry light, light smeared like some c...
I just want to tell her that I'm sorry, Wallow says softly. He doesn't know that I'm awake. He's talking to himself, or maybe to the ocean. There's not a trace of fear in his voice. And it's clear the...
Grammar can erect a false wall. Look at how I keep falling into this trap, writing this piece. To refer to the thousands of diverse individuals with unique histories who are sleeping on the street ton...