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.
Who is going to pay a day's wage to slide down a damn tongue? -- The Chief, Swamplandia
Who can say what the dead do or do not know? Perhaps the knowledge of one's death, ceaselessly swallowed, is the very food you need to become a ghost.
We don’t have any garlic bulbs, so I bring the cauliflower, and hope that any vampires I encounter will be of the myopic, easily duped variety.
The whistle dropped from the branch's spindly fingers like a black cocoon, a pendulum of secret music; the wind pushed sound soundlessly around.
That summer Nal was fourteen and looking for excuses to have extreme feelings about himself.
Still, I'm not convinced that you were right, Dai--that it's such a bad thing, a useless enterprise to reel and reel out my memory at night. Some part of me, the human part of me, is kept alive by thi...
My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.
My father has the settler’s scar, a pink star scored into the brown leather of his palm by the handle of the moldboard plow.
If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.
But if it turns out that she really can adjust them from without? Reshuffle the deck of his past, leave a few cards out, sub in several from a sunnier suit, where was the harm in that? Harm had to be...
Women revert to their maiden names in Heaven, Rutherford feels fairly certain. He can't remember where he learned this--France or the Bible.
There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.
The body can be a marvel of resiliency, a cactus when it comes to sleep - capable of surviving on mere drops.
I say nothing. But I keep thinking: It's been two years. What if all the Olivia-ness has already seeped out of her and evaporated into the violet welter of clouds? Evaporated, and rained down, and eva...
But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.
A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
Words, I guess, are her more durable artifacts.
With her mauve lipstick in place and her glossy hair smoothed, she was shooting colors all around the room. Could you scare a dead boy with the vibrancy of your life?
What a weird future awaited her in the past!