You cut up your feet pretty good, but nothing deep enough to need stitches. That was almost a mile walk and you sick as him, and barefoot to boot. I don’t know how you did it. You must love that child...
When deep summer comes and the dog star raises with the morning sun, the land can scab up and a man watch his spring crop wrinkle brown like something on fire. It's the season snakes go blind. Their e...
What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she’d worn to ch...
Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surfa...
The woman doesn't look up. It's as if she's deaf. Maybe she is. Maybe she's like the Cambodian women I've read about, the ones who witnessed so many atrocities that they have willed themselves blind....
Spend a long time alone, especially if you're someone who's never been that social to begin with, and you find yourself craving solitude.
She’d never known fear had a taste, but it did.
Of course, who can forget that first love, or first sex, or first drink - especially if they all occur together. I also remember how, after Ligeia had left our lives, I'd worried for months that she m...
It’s a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming into it. Tears from the very start.
In a small Southern town during the 1950s, elopement and divorce were serious moral transgressions deserving of punishment.
He carries what he feels for people deep inside. Even as a kid he was that way, Aunt Margaret said. Your momma knows that. But I had wondered then as I did now what good love was that couldn’t be expr...
A mown hay field appears, its blond stubble blackened by a flock of starlings. As I pass, the field seems to lift, peek to see what's under itself, then resettles. A pickup passes from the other direc...
A car horn startled her, and she knew if she lived here the rest of her life, she'd never get used to the busyness of town life, how something was always coming and going and whatever that something w...
I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries an...
What does eminent domain mean? Stewart asked. It means you’re shit out of luck, Ross said.
One guy has his head on a table, eyes closed, vomit drooling from his mouth. Another pulls out his false teeth and clamps them on the ear of a gal at the next table. An immense woman in a purple jumps...
It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember,...
I guess sometimes you’ve got the hope-fors so much it makes you imagine all sorts of things.
But as Rachel watched the sheriff enter the front door, it was hard to believe the farmhouse itself was still there, because a place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exis...
After hours of wearing stifling suits while seated on rigid pews and high-backed dining chairs, to enter water and splay our limbs was freeing. The midday sun fell full on the pool, so when we waded i...