My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonig...
She'd gotten even prettier over the years. And now she was in his house. And he had no idea if this was the best thing to happen to him or the stupidest thing he'd ever done. Kelsey watched Nate go, thinking this might've been the worst decision she'...
But life has a way of chopping people off at the knees, and he was no exception. Ten years of his life had been stolen from him. Now he wasn't wasting another minute. He wanted to experience everything he had missed, to eat and drink and read and wor...
Josh Funk and Hunter Fraser: we haven't been in touch in years, but you made me feel like the funniest kid in the world. I would stay up late on school nights to write things to try to make you laugh the next day in class, and you inspired the one pi...
I had kissed my share of men, particularly during the war years, when flirtation and instant romance were the light-minded companions of death and uncertainty. Jamie, thought, was something different. His extreme gentleness was in no way tentative; r...
Yes, now you know. Now you know! That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always...
What happened next… well, I'm going to blame it on the fact that I was scared. And I had just flown or fallen or something through about eighty years worth of Time. Or maybe it was the beans. I farted. I farted loud enough that it echoed around the...
It is a well known fact that Abraham Lincoln spent much of his spare time visiting wounded soldiers in Union Army hospitals. I've spent thirty years teaching history at Columbia and I don't think I've spent more than fifteen minutes in the freshman d...
Over the years, I have developed a visceral reaction to families and victims expressing surprise at tragedy. Why are we surprised? Why do we forget we are mortal? Bad, bad things happen everywhere, every day. Humans, for better or worse, harbor this ...
When I left you," he whispered, "you were already more beautiful than anything I dared to dream. In our years apart, my imaginings did their best to improve on your perfection. At night, your face was forever behind my eyes. And now I see that that v...
At seventeen, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you became as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smi...
How do they find out with the experiments?' '...one way they can find out a whole lot is to make an animal ill and then try different ways to make it better until they find one that works.' 'But isn't that unkind to the animal?' 'Well, I suppose it i...
I came to the state twenty years ago from the South, the gothic South. I’ve heard it called that, haven’t you, Mister Morgan? ‘Thought I was gettin’ away from all that. You know, the Tennessee Williams’ decadence, the Huey Long corruption, ...
Help" is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn't matter how you pray--with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Year...
If your confidence is based purely on the way you look, you’re setting yourself up for a) years of fretting about how to appear perfect, and b) anxiety / despair as the wrinkles inevitably set in. (Not to mention the fact that the world is FULL of ...
It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make Man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day Is fairer far in May Although it fall and die that night; It was the plant and fl...
We must have public officials who will stand up and tell the people exactly what they think... Our failure in recent years has not been the failure of the people to meet the challenges placed before them, but rather the failure of both our great poli...
In her mind's eye she saw it, saw it all at last: the rolling armies and the flames of battle; the graves and pits and dying cries of a hundred million souls; the spreading darkness, like a black wing stretching over the earth; the last, bitter hours...
We say that flowers return every spring, but that is a lie. It is true that the world is renewed. It is also true that that renewal comes at a price, for even if the flower grows from an ancient vine, the flowers of spring are themselves new to the w...
I guess I might be bi-curious," Ben said quietly." "What?" "I said I could be sorta bi-curious," Ben said loudly. "That's someone who is fundamentally straight but is curious about sex with men." Joshua grunted his opinion of that. "You've been check...
We collected all the bones we could find, and yesterday, Natividad wrapped them in a shawl that she had knitted years ago. It was the most beautiful thing she owned. "A thing like that should serve the living," Bankole said when she offered it. "You ...
