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 Servant of HistoryHer eyes were of the lightest blue as if time had rinsed away most of the colour, but there was a liveliness inside them.
What does eminent domain mean? Stewart asked. It means you’re shit out of luck, Ross said.
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...
She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface...
Rachel felt the grief grow so wide and deep it felt like a dark fathomless pool she'd never emerge from. Because there was nothing left to do now, nothing except endure it.
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...
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 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,...
He was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet does not say ‘The town is near,’ but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges, Thomas Wolfe declares at the end of Look H...
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...
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...
So people surprise us. They can lie to each other, as my brother had done to me, and as I had lied to him that September evening at Panther Creek, and now it appeared those two lies could only lead to...
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...
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...
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.
Stewart unfolded the oilcloth that kept his Bible dry and began reading. Ross reached into his pocket and brought out his tobacco pouch. He removed his rolling papers and found them sodden as Snipes’...
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...
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...
I turn onto North Market Street to pass Thomas Wolfe’s house. I’d planned to do my dissertation on Wolfe. My advisor argued against it. Wolfe is all but forgotten now, she said, which seemed all the m...