Jacob closed his eyes but did not sleep. Instead, he imagined towns where hungry men hung on boxcars looking for work that couldn’t be found, shacks where families lived who didn’t even have one swayb...
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...
Something Rich and StrangeShe takes a step and the water rises higher on her knees. Four more steps, she tells herself. Just four more and I'll turn back. She takes another step and the bottom is no l...
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.
Superstitions are just coincidence or ignorance.
The lift of her heart she'd felt on the outcrop she now felt again, and it wasn't just love. She'd felt love before, known its depths when her mother died.This was something rarer. Happiness, Laurel t...
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...
All the while remembering what it had felt like when the world you knew had up and vanished, and you needed to find something to bring that world back, and you weren’t sure that you could.
Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the a...
Disse Serena.
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...
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...
And darkness. You can’t see it no more than you can see air, but when it’s all around you sure enough know it.
Do this one thing.
Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. Those who use it and those who endure it are turned to st...
I missed that one,' Henryson said. 'The war, I mean.''Don't worry,' Snipes said. 'Another one's always coming down the pike. That's something all your historians and philosophers agree on. A feller ov...
In a small Southern town during the 1950s, elopement and divorce were serious moral transgressions deserving of punishment.
Jody had watched other classmates, including many in college prep, enter such a life with an impatient fatalism. They got pregnant or arrested or simply dropped out. Some boys, more defiant, filled th...
My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I’d read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She’d loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me afte...
Something Rich and StrangeShe was less of what she had been, the blue rubbed from her eyes, flesh freed from the chandelier of bone. He touched what once had been a hand. The river whispered to him th...
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