One by one the angels had come to the top of Har Megiddo where I sat, holding her body close to mine after she'd died. I'd fought alongside them in battle, but up close, when they stood quietly watching us, they looked as beautiful as they looked unr...
I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I th...
Many veterans feel guilty because they lived while others died. Some feel ashamed because they didn’t bring all their men home and wonder what they could have done differently to save them. When they get home they wonder if there’s something wron...
What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to hav...
From "Lunchtime At The Justice Cafe" : The waitress snarled a grin that lasted just long enough to show a mouthful of stained yellowed teeth, then turned suddenly serious. “‘Course I’m not the one to talk about these folks, I ‘spose. You see,...
Beannacht / Blessing On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you. And when your eyes freeze behind the grey window and the ghost of loss gets in to you, may a flock of colours, indigo, red, ...
(Divorce) We’ll remarry someday when we’ve grown, Like royalty who’ve earned the throne. An aisle made of gold, To have and to hold. My dress made of rags, A suit that’s so torn. All eyes are on me, But mine only on you. You give your hand, A...
Her tone changed from shocked to curious. “How was it? Was it… different?” Sarah bit her lip, ashamed to be gossiping but feeling the strong urge to tell. “Yes,” she confided. “He’s nothing like John. Nothing like him at all.” “Real...
Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning... No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire novel's worth of thought would have to be expended on eac...
On the other side of that big-ass mirror, a video camera was watching us. In about ten seconds, it was going to start spitting static at itself, and everything it saw was going to break up into a fuzzy, gray-white wash, rolling up and down, that woul...
An oncology ward is a battlefield, and there are definite hierarchies of command. The patients, they're the ones doing the tour of duty. The doctors breeze in and out like conquering heroes, but they need to read your child's chart to remember where ...
The woman had gasped beneath his heavy body. He rubbed against her, lubricated by the warm, sticky liquid, but as her body gradually grew cold, he felt as though they'd been glued together. She seemed to be see-sawing between agony and ecstasy, but f...
Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had ...
Personally, if I were trying to discourage people from smoking, my sign would be a little different. In fact, I might even go too far in the opposite direction. My sign would say something like, "Smoke if you wish. But if you do, be prepared for the ...
I know that whatever the complex origins of my own homosexuality are, there have been conscious choices I've made to indulge - and therefore to intensify, probably - my homoerotic inclinations. As I look back over the course of my life, I regret the ...
Tiffany got up early and lit the fires. When her mother came down, she was scrubbing the kitchen floor, very hard. “Er…aren’t you supposed to do that sort of thing by magic, dear?” said her mother, who’d never really got the hang of what wi...
Home is where I take up such a tiny portion of the memory foam; home is a splintered word. His pillow is a sweat-stained map of an escape plot, also a map of love’s dear abandon. (When did he give way, at which breath?) Forgiveness may mean retrosp...
What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born. Her face, at once innocent and feral, soft and wild! Her mouth voluptuous. Ey...
The tears in my pus-filled eyes became a thousand little crystals of ever color. Like stained-glass windows, I thought. God is with you today, Papi! In the midst of nature's monstrous elements, in the wind, the immenseness of the sea, the depth of th...
Hello," Life says, "Remember me? We started out together here When you were just a bundle Of innocent amazement. Remember how you saw the world With nothing but wonder? We were such rowdy playmates then. We painted on the sky with clouds And made mag...
Squinting in the darkness Anya could just make out a strange curving symbol scratched into the bark. Baba Zosia scored a line through it, disfiguring the symbol. Anya felt something in the air change and give, like the forest had let out a breath it ...
