Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning, We will come back to earth some fragrant night, And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white. We will come down at night to these resounding beache...
Where is my chance to be somebody's Peter Van Houten?' He hit the steering wheel weakly, the car honking as he cried. He leaned his head back, looking up. 'I hate myself I hate myself I hate this I hate this I disgust myself I hate it I hate it I hat...
We told Mom about the Anne Frank House, leaving out the kissing. "Did you go back to chez Van Houten afterward?" Mom asked. Augustus didn't even give me time to blush. "Nah, we just hung out at a café. Hazel amused me with some Venn diagram humor." ...
Murderers don't get forgiven just because we promise to be good from now on. We have to earn our way back. One hundred is the price. One hundred lives for each we took. That seems fair. That's how we get whole again and that's our work, from now unti...
As we walk back, it feels like the city is engulfing us. Adrenalin still pours through our veins. Sparks flow through to our fingers. We've still been running in the mornings, but the city's different then. It's filled with hope and with bristles of ...
The color of defeat chokes her pupils, even though her nod and smile and uncomfortable sitting motion on the couch indicate that she is not finished yet. She will carry on, like all of us. Smile stubborn. Smile with instinct, then lick your wounds in...
You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, "We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperatu...
If only parents would listen! If only they would let us talk instead of forever and eternally and continuously harping and preaching and nagging and correcting and yacking, yacking, yacking! But they won’t listen! They simply won’t or can’t or ...
There was a smile dancing on his lips, although it was a wary smile, for the world is a bigger place than a little graveyard on a hill; and there would be dangers in it and mysteries, new friends to make, old friends to rediscover, mistakes to be mad...
There's a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word "occupation" is only restricted to wha...
I can't get his bones to go down the fucking drain. I try to stuff the tiny holes, too tiny for this pain. I can't get his bones to break any way for my gain. Break them back a little too far, never too far for the sake of sane.
Dreams are a direct feedback mechanism to the dreamer. They will tell you if you're getting sick, if you need to repair your relationship with your kids, if you're in a toxic romantic relationship, if you need self-care; the imagery will report back ...
My yogurt was nestled into a bag, waiting to turn into aushak, and all around us were sausages and pastry, lollipops and spices, chicken and cheese. Any world that contained all this, I thought surveying our loot, was a very fine place. I felt reinvi...
He flipped it open, gently tugged out the oft-touched photo and looked into a pair of familiar golden eyes. "She's happy, Andie," he whispered to his wife. Andromeda Quinn did what she always did. She smiled back at him, her beautiful eyes lit with t...
She worried that maybe they'd been dating too long to end up together. It was like when you tried to jump off the high dive and if you did it right away, you were fine. But if you stood there looking down, thinking of all the bad things that could ha...
The silent horror of Archie's ordeal had been temporarily replaced by the howling, agonising pain of the blood refusing to drain from his penis, the end of which was a deep purple verging on black where Officer Griff had tested how hard it was by usi...
My courage is faith--faith in the eternal resilience of me--that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide--not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've bee...
Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had...
I'm not bloody well going to have it, understand?" Vimes shouted, shaking the ape back and forth. "Oook," the Librarian pointed out, patiently. "What? Oh. Sorry." Vimes lowered the ape, who wisely didn't make an issue out of it because a man angry en...
Vimes stuck his helmet under his arm, smoothed back his hair, and knocked. He'd considered asking Sargent Colon to accompany him, but had brushed the idea aside quickly. He couldn't have tolerated the sniggering. Anyway, what was there to be afraid o...
New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance...
