But things can be over in horizontal time and just beginning in your body, I’m learning. Sometimes the memory of that summer feels like a spore in me, a seed falling through me.
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...
Who is going to pay a day's wage to slide down a damn tongue? -- The Chief, Swamplandia
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 dad's version of the book, the staid, declarative Guide to the Galaxy, is nearly identical, except that the graphics are a matte black, and the same information is listed as Fact #47. I guess that'...
I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.
But in fact I was like Ossie, in this one regard: I was consumed by a helpless, often furious love for a ghost. Every rock on the island, every swaying tree branch or dirty dish in our house was like...
As dizzy as the stars, as near and alone.
A definite hostility to being looked at, like a vampire or a vacationing Olsen
Women revert to their maiden names in Heaven, Rutherford feels fairly certain. He can't remember where he learned this--France or the Bible.
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.
What bird are you calling?' I ask, finally, when I can't stand it any longer. The bird man stops whistling. He grins, so that I can see all his pebbly teeth. He holds out a hand to me over the broth-t...
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.
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.
I don't even want to try to understand it, and so begin to mistake it for something else after that, paling shadows of this original feeling, something inaudibly delicate that would not survive the pa...
Don't look back, you asshole! he thought. Good advice, from Orpheus to Lot.
A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
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.