We amassed a plastic weapons cache in the hollow of the oak that included the Sounds of Warfare Blazer, a toy gun that required sixteen triple-A batteries to make a noise like a tubercular guinea pig....
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...
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 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.
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 mother is thirty-one years old, but the land out here paints old age onto her.
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...
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...
Granana lives on the other side of the island. She's eighty-four, I'm twelve, and Wallow's fourteen, so it's a little ambiguous as to who's babysitting whom.
Weather damage is the inverse of a victimless crime - people get robbed of everything, and there is no evildoer to lock in a cage.
We clacked skeletons -- to call it an embrace would misrepresent the violence of our first collision.
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...
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.
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.
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.
But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.
Being unconscious with somebody, that's a big deal.