This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone--other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, th...
This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
This bug is something new though. We’ve got the bioprint.
They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.
They meet in church basements and offer bandages to those wounded by the shrapnel of exploding families.
They are as happy as they can be, given who they are. Though if they'd been different people they might have been happier.
These days I script whole fights, in my head, and the reconciliations afterwards, too.
There’s nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy.
There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.
There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.
There's blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.
There was always an element of melancholy involved in sex. After his indiscriminate adolescence he'd preferred sad women, delicate and breakable, women who'd been messed up and who needed him.
There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier-glass, like...
There is nothing more onerous than enforced gratitude.
There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. , is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.
Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.
Then she lent me her red flannel petticoat until I should get one of my own, and showed me how to fold and pin the cloths, and said hat some called it Eve's curse but she thought that was stupid, and...
Their youngness is terrifying. How could I have put myself into the hands of such inexperience?
The war takes place in black and white. For those on the sidelines that is. For those who are actually in it there are many different colours, excessive colours, too bright, too red and orange, too li...
The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves in...