Someone was coming through the velvet. He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrel’s balcony—close, closer still as she turned and the curtain swayed, then stopped. He pinned the velvet against frame. He held the sweep of it high, at the...
Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of...
Just before he passed behind the hedge at the end of the drive, he turned to look back at Stoke Morrow and caught me spying on him. His shining eyes were so cruel, and before I could close the curtain, I saw the flash of an awful grin on his face. It...
In trans women's eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognized as female, a raw strength that only comes fro unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world.
He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks, the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, "Do you think I look like a murderer? In your good opinion?" A silence. After a while,...
She opened her eyes once again and let them drift across the scene laid out before her like a page from a storybook. Inky blackness hung above them as though painted in impasto in an opaque Prussian Blue. The impression it gave was of a sky hand-craf...
When your ears hear and your eyes see the sin, weakness, or failure of your husband or wife, it is never an accident; it is always grace. God loves your spouse, and he is committed to transforming him or her by his grace, and he has chosen you to be ...
The imagination and trust of a young child are immeasurable. Through the prism of their eyes all things are possible, all dreams come true, and all people are friends. There is beauty in the seriousness of their play and their laughter is pure and un...
The men stop coming after Hunt goes missing. We learned from the last brave soul to visit that they whispered all sorts of stories to answer his disappearance. My favorite is that we ate him. We cooked him up with our whore-earned corn, a dozen rats�...
The moment you realize that life will hurt more than your death. While existing, we're forced to become acquainted with sadness. There's no antibiotic for the ridding of distress, and no alleviation of these intervals of pain we must encounter. Behin...
The great thing about the Internet isn't that you can reconnect with old friends or stay up to date with developing world events or send pictures of newborns immediately around the world. It is simply that you can log on to jcpenney.com from anywhere...
They were partners. She would always make impulsive decisions and he would make slow, reasoned ones. He would always be a little terrified that she would look at him with the scorn he saw in his mother's eyes. And she would always be a little terrifi...
She rolled her eyes to the ceiling, clearly telling him what she thought about his need to protect his pride. He leaned down, his face inches from hers, and tapped a finger against her lips, somehow managing to ignore their softness and the overwhelm...
To these children, the door William has just come through is a portal. Being shoved through it means a trip to hell where only demons come to visit and the man before them fits that description; his deep, hard eyes frame his long, winding scar and be...
Did I use enough lube last night?” I turned my head to the side and closed my eyes with blushing cheeks. “Don’t…don’t call it that.” “What? Lube?” he asked. I nodded and covered my mouth with my hand. He chuckled and smirked. “All r...
Beneath my eyes opens -- a book; I see to the bottom; the heart -- I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love bru...
And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of h...
I had a dream about you. The blue sky matched the blue in your eyes, though you had a few more clouds in your irises. When you got sad, you didn’t cry—you rained, and that’s why I approached you to try to sell you a nose umbrella, something tha...
I said I don't want to know," Kailani said firmly, her voice suddenly too loud. Cristina sat back into the bench, her eyes wide and disappointed. Then Ana started waving wildly, her small hand arcing for her mother's undivided attention, and, as Kail...
For a moment we sit in silence. Eventually, I turn to him and say, "Do you believe in God?" His eyes narrow for a moment and he stares at me at me for a while. Stares in a rather intense way, like a doctor looking at a troubling X-ray. Then he looks ...
Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. "I wonder what he...
