We clacked skeletons -- to call it an embrace would misrepresent the violence of our first collision.
Warm winds and cold winds charged into the system--the collision of temperatures that keeps a baby spinning, breathing. The goal is to get that rotation to be self-sustaining. It's an art, no doubt, t...
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...
My oldest daughter was four pounds at birth, and her appearance flooded the earth with an infinite number of horrors and perils, a demonic surge of catastrophic possibilities out of all proportion to...
My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the...
My mother is thirty-one years old, but the land out here paints old age onto her.
Maybe that rusty boat hangar looked like the entrance to a cave to her, he'd said. Maybe. If you were eight, and near-sighted, and nostalgic for places that you'd never been.But if the Glowworm Grotto...
Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.
Long before the kaiko change turned us into mirror images of one another, we were sisters already, spinning identical dreams in beds thousands of miles apart, fantasizing about gold silks and an imper...
Kiwi thought back to his first weeks, when insults had been impossible for him. One time he'd called Deemer a troglodyte but his delivery had been tentative and way, way too slow, as if the insult wer...
It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
Hundreds of our old neighbors, friends, coworkers, and teachers are new insomniacs. They file for dream bankruptcy, appeal for Slumber Corps aid, wait to be approved for a sleep donor. It is a special...
How could you make a mistake when you had one option?
He tried to scrub children's vomit from the webbing of the Tongue in a way that suggested deep reservoirs of genius.
First love, first love, Sean murmured sadly, scratching his bubonic nose. Who are we to intervene, eh? It will die of natural causes.Natural causes!She was thinking that the poor girl had been garrote...
Faith was a power that arose from inside you, I thought, and doubt was exogenous, a speck in your eye. A black mote from the sad world of adults.
America’s great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imag...
A scuola, Camp Dark picchiava i ragazzini come un quartetto. Lo facevamo in un silenzio animale. Trascinavamo un ragazzino isterico dietro l'edificio di scienze in mattoni rossi - di solito qualcuno p...
When the door came loose, colors flooded over us. I screamed, too, and covered my face with my arms, and if Ossie hadn’t caught me I might have fallen into the wedge of canal between the shoreline and...
Weather damage is the inverse of a victimless crime - people get robbed of everything, and there is no evildoer to lock in a cage.