You can’t cheat if there are no rules
I tear down Baxter, which loops around the last mile down to Back Cove.And then I stop short. The buildings have fallen away behind me, giving way to ramshackle sheds, sparsely situated on either side...
My aunt just stood there, and in that second it was as though the world and the future collapsed down into a single point, and I understood that this—the kitchen, the spotless cream linoleum floors, t...
The butterflies are working their way up from my stomach into my head, making me feel dizzy, and I try to calm myself by imagining the ocean outside, its ragged breathing, the seagulls turning pinwhee...
See?” my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. “We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?”And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of deat...
Sympathizer.It’s only slightly better than the other word that followed me for years after my mom’s death, a snakelike hiss, undulating, leaving its trail of poison: Suicide.A sideways word, a word th...
This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you. This is half the reason for the cure: It clean-sweeps; it makes the past, and all its pain, distant, like the barest...
I wish I could close my eyes and be blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind.
Things weren’t always as good as they are now. In school we learned that in the old days, the dark days, people didn’t realize how deadly a disease love was.For a long time they even viewed it as a go...
As soon as she sees me she swings forward and hits a key on her keyboard. The music cuts off instantly. Strangely, the silence that follows seems just as loud.
I feel as though I’m in a dream, where strange things are happening but they don’t feel strange. Everything is cloudy—everything is wrapped in a fog—and I’m filled from head to toe with the single, bu...
Strains of music spring up, crystallizing in the night air like rain turning suddenly to snow, drifting to earth.
This music ebbs and flows, irregular, sad. It reminds me, weirdly, of watching the ocean during a bad storm, the lashing, crashing waves and the spray of sea foam against the docks; the way it takes y...
