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'...
If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.
Help! she screams to a sky full of crows. He’s not actually from Europe!
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...
A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
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 is going to pay a day's wage to slide down a damn tongue? -- The Chief, Swamplandia
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
Words, I guess, are her more durable artifacts.
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 clacked skeletons -- to call it an embrace would misrepresent the violence of our first collision.
The boy could scarcely believe the size of the boulders, clustered under the enormous sun like dead red rockets awaiting repair, or the span of the sky, a cheerfully vacant blue dome, the desert's hal...
The body can be a marvel of resiliency, a cactus when it comes to sleep - capable of surviving on mere drops.
It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
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...