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?
Whatever song we are making in this place, we are going to die without hearing.
The Sticksels have met every Homestead Act requirement save one, its final strangeness, what Pa calls the wink in the bureaucrats’ wall: a glass window.
The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. When I was a kid I couldn't see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!'s fall that time folded into a st...
Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself.
Only one or two lemons tumble from the branches each hour, but I’ve been sitting here so long their falls seem contiguous, close as raindrops.
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...
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...
I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling, and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.
I needed a darkness that would have killed the others. And they needed me to keep it a secret from them.
I had to explain to him Mom's death, which was always hard to do. It felt like killing her again.
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...
Don't look back, you asshole! he thought. Good advice, from Orpheus to Lot.
Their eyes flicking all over each other.
You can always put balsamic vinaigrette on salted meat and sort of pretend it’s a salad.
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...
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....
Uncle Fitzy! the girl yells. Gingersnap is being bad! Eisenhower hates it when she calls him Gingersnap. He complains about it with a statesman's pomp: Gentlemen, there exists no more odious appellati...
This is it, the geographical limit of how far I'll go for Ossie. We are learning longitude and latitude in school, and it makes my face burn that I can graph the coordinates of my own love and courage...