Duke was already sitting in the passenger seat, waiting for her. She got in and started the car. Duke busted into a Slim Jim of his own. “You hairy toad fucker. That stuff’s nasty. Your toilet must be like a nuclear reactor.” Dove turned on her...
I don't know what I expected – no maybe I do, Al Pacino from Scarface- but this drug dealer is more like Al Pacino at the beginning of The Godfather reasonably bemused, untouched by his criminal world, sitting with Diane Keaton whispering about Luc...
What are you working on?" Elizabeth asked. Nate could hear her tapping a pencil on her desk. She took notes during their conversations. He didn't know what she did with the notes, but it bothered him. "I have a lecture at the sanctuary in four days."...
I saw a news report recently that measured average video game use by American men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five: twenty hours per week. Do you mean the flower of America's masculinity can't think of anything more important to do wit...
Yes no yes no yes no? Red blue? Yes red, no blue? No red, yes no? In out, up down? Do don't, can can't? Choices sit on the shelf life New shoes in a shoe shop. If the in crowd are squeezing into a must-have shoe And the one pair left are too tiny for...
We're freaks, the two of us, Franny and I. I'm a twenty-five-year-old freak and she's a twenty-one-year-old freak, and both those bastards are responsible. I swear to you, I could murder them both without batting an eyelash. The great teachers. The g...
My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She’d set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I’d begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were fading and blending in with walls. She was shrinking. Or maybe her sph...
I went in - after making every possible noise in the kitchen, short of pushing over the stove - but I don't believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as if some question had been asked, or was in ...
His face was pale, and he dropped to the floor so that he was half kneeling, half sitting before her. "Please. I can...help you." "No." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her mind felt clearer now. Everything made more sense when she wasn...
My computer set-up is crazy. I have wireless set up on my iMac, aimed at a router, which itself is perfectly angled at another router, which in turn is angled at a sofa covered in tinfoil to bounce the signal to the original source. If you want to si...
She wanted to sit in the pub with him the way Sam did with Steve, the way Matty and Karen had done last weekend with their boyfriends, to hold his hand as they walked down the street, to be able to smile in public at him, not this controlled, agonisi...
When a feeling hits, keep breathing. Let air flow through your body. Let your heart beat as it always faithfully does. And let the feeling pass through you. Maybe it will be momentary, or maybe it will spend the night. But it will not last forever. I...
It would be autumn, and our fathers would be out threshing in the fields. We would walk through the mulberry groves, past the big loquat tree and the old lotus pond, where we used to catch tadpoles in the spring. Our dogs would come running up to us....
Outside the seasons passed: sun, snow, spring green, October storms . . . was this a vision of my future? When would the shunning hero come, to set the clock if my life in motion again? Would he come some morning, or in the night? In April or Decembe...
I turned to see his expression. When I saw that he was serious, I shot hum a dubious look. “Sleeping in between the toilet and the tub on a cold, hard tile floor with a vomiting idiot was one of your best nights? That’s sad, Trav.” “No, sitti...
The costumes help. They make it less real, disguise what it really is both for the actors and for the people who'll see it on the screen. It's like the people who read and because it's in Russia they can say, 'Oh, that's not my pain they're talking a...
For each man kills the thing he loves yet each man does not die he does not die a death of shame on a day of dark disgrace nor have a noose about his neck, nor a cloth upon his face nor drop feet foremost through the floor into an empty space He does...
I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration- joy and pain sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some he...
It was common for my father to sit my sisters down and tell them things like, "I saw a girl working in the bank in town, and she was a girl just like you." My parents had never completed primary school. They couldn't speak English or even read that w...
He sits in an old armchair in the corner covered with bits of blankets and a bucket behind the chair that stinks enough to make you sick and when you look at that old man in the dark corner you want to get a hose with hot water and strip him and wash...
...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, ...