We are all raccoon-drunk on moonlight and bloodshed and the heady, underblossom smell of the forest.
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...
The krill are in a rebuilding year. The krill are always in a rebuilding year. Every year the whole franchise of 60,000,000,000 krill gets eaten. Team Whale sucks Team Krill into the primordial combs...
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...
That was my first clue that love can warp a hierarchy; the whole pyramid got flipped on its head. My pet, because she was mine, was at the top of the chain. I cared for the squirmy swamp rats in the m...
Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself.
Some team! The Chief was doing so many jobs alone. I’d fix on the Chief’s raw, rope-burned palms or all the gray hairs collected in his sink, and I’d suffer this terrible side pain that Kiwi said was...
Rule One: Make friends with deathTailgating in the Antarctic is no joke. We are trying to do nothing less ambitious than reverse the course of history. We want Team Krill to defeat Team Whale.Look, if...
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.
Nal had begun to sense that his life had jumped the rails—and then right at his nadir, he’d agreed to an avant haircut performed by Cousin Steve.
I wanted to touch the edges of my life - the same instinct, I think, that inspires young mortals to flip tractors and enlist in foreign wars.
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.
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...
Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests...
Help! she screams to a sky full of crows. He’s not actually from Europe!
Heartbreak is the university diagnosis for the pain that accompanies the end of love. But this was an unusual breakup, in that Cillian's mind shattered first.