There were a lot of these middle-aged single types in the neighborhood, shipwrecked by every kind of catastrophe, but she was one of the few who didn't have children, who lived alone, who was still kinda young. Something must have happened, your moth...
They segued into a more general piece about AIDS. As usual, they started out with footage of some kind of sweaty nightclub in the city with a bunch of gay men dancing around in stupid leather outfits. I couldn't even begin to imagine Finn dancing the...
Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the pla...
Are you prepared?" she asked when the other Valkyries had their passengers in place. "Sure," Matt said. "But we could use a soundtrack this time. Maybe a little Wagner. Da-da-da DUM dum." Hildar looked back at hiim blankly. "Wagner? Ride of the Valky...
Maybe that would be less crucial under Obama, Podesta thought, because Obama's approach was so intellectual. He compared Obama to Spock from . The president-elect wanted to put his own ideas to work. He was unsentimental and capable of being ruthless...
If you find the dividing line between fairy tales and reality, let me know. In my mind, the two run together, even though the intersections aren't always obvious. The girl sitting quietly in class or waiting for the bus or roaming the mall doesn't wa...
Because it's kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way. And Agloe is a place where a paper creation became real. A dot on the map became a real place, more real than the people who cre...
When a memory fails to appear, it seems as though the time when it was created did not really exist, and maybe that is true. Time itself is nothing; only the experience of it is something. When that dies, it assumes the form of a denial, the symbol o...
No one escapes the wounding of the soul. You, much like me may have many questions of a painful past and focus on that pain. Maybe you have sought love and affection only to be used and left empty inside. Even now you close yourself off determined ne...
I made my first fire last night and I didn't even set myself aflame! It was fantastic". "If you need more, there's plenty where that came from". "Sure, I'll take your wood anytime!" Matty fought the smile that threatened to engulf his face, and he co...
He’s as tense as I am, maybe even more so, but it’s so hard to reconcile that with the serenity of weightlessness. His faux-blond hair is floating out away from his head. He’s wearing a worn, much-mended, and too-large shirt his friend in town ...
The witch's hair was too short and too dark for blond. She wasn't sure if that relieved her or disturbed her. Riley had immediately begun his interrogation, and it had gone something like this: Riley: Where is the meeting between your kind and Aden S...
In decades from now, I’m sure they’ll say we Joes were all noble, every one of us grimy but patriotic cherubs. Because we won a war. Back home they already do think it, thanks to the publicity teams, the ads, correspondents, censors. I’m not bu...
Once Kimmy and Bobby walked in Taco Bell they saw their two friends already sitting at the table, and Kimmy and Bobby ordered their food before they joined them. “What’s up?” Manning asked. “Not much, just hanging out,” Bobby answered. “A...
Maybe what stopped people from voting wasn't a lack of information about the candidates or a feeling that the outcomes of races didn't matter or a sense that a trip to the polls was inconvenient. What if voting wasn't only a political act, but a soci...
Sasha's green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. "In Naples," she said, "there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones...
Lea found that she was saying things, saying them pretty loudly, but had no clear concept of what she was saying. [Sean and Andy’s] names, maybe. The seventy-two names of God. The capitals of all fifty states. Love. That word featured in there a lo...
There's a stream that trickles through all of us. It's always there. It's evil and we know this, so we force it to mix with the larger river inside us. We let it be consumed by the greater flow of good. But when the good in the river runs dry and the...
And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, is that if something happened to one of us--excuse me for saying this--but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, ...
no, no, it's not all random, if it really was all random, the universe would abandon us completely. and the universe doesn't. it takes care of its most fragile creations in ways we can't see. like with parents who adore you blindly. and a big sister ...
Oh, she was okay, just tired, tired of trying to be the one you wanted, the one you couldn't live without, the one you found yourself reaching out an arm for as she teetered from crisis to crisis to crisis only to collapse in your bed at the end of t...
