They say that somewhere in Africa the elephants have a secret grave where they go to lie down, unburden their wrinkled gray bodies, and soar away, light spirits at the end.
Tick … tick … tick. Time, the king of cruelty.
A few of them were already hollering for help, but most were shocked silent. His mother had looked at him, orange juice dripping from her hair and face, and said, Next year we go to the beach.
The sharp white steeple of the Hawthorne First Baptist Church stuck up through the leafless trees like an admonishing finger.
The same river can never be crossed twice. The flowing water has no memory of footprints.
Because if it’s not safe here, it’s not safe anywhere in this world. His voice cracked a little on the last word.
The magic place of soul-soothing dreams, where the silken sheen of polished glass under soft lights made her think of how lovely Heaven was going to be.
Something inside her brain cracked like a funhouse mirror that existed only to reflect a distorted world,
Swan was approaching, trying to run but being thrown off balance by the weight of her head.
Johnny James was sitting on the front porch, sipping from a glass of gasoline in the December heat, when the doom-screamer came.
It was certainly a miracle that they were still alive, and a corpse that could sit up and speak was not something you saw every day.
It seemed to Billy that no matter how far you walked, you never really got to the end of things.
She recalled a glass angel in the window once—a powerful figure: the angel’s long hair was swept back like holy, glittering fire,
His hair was think and curly and reddish-brown, his eyes a clear ice blue; Ramona had told him many times that she could see the sky in them, clouds when he was angry and rain when he was sad. Now, if...
It had been a joyful day for frogs and mud hens. For the human breed, however, the low gray clouds and chill rain coiled chains around the soul.
We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out,...
Her eyes found his. Like the wind. Or a train’s whistle, way far off. Or thunder, long before you see the lightning. A lot of things. How long have you been able to hear it? Since I was a little girl....
We had a love affair with fire, the president of the United States thought as the match that he’d just struck to light his pipe flared beneath his fingers. He stared into it, mesmerized by its color—a...
The evening crept up, as evenings will. In the fading purple twilight, with the last bold artist's stroke of red sun painting the bellies of clouds across the western horizon, Matthew took a lantern a...
The Basement was an underground shelter in Delaware where the first lady, the president’s seventeen-year-old son, ranking cabinet members and staff people would—they hoped—be protected from all but a...
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