You think I read your thoughts, but it's your eyes that speak to me. When they glisten with moisture, I see a depth of emotion stirring behind them. One tearful glance begs me for a reassuring embrace. When your gaze glazes over like a misty morning,...
I know that life is busy and hard and that there's crushing pressure to just settle down and get a real job and khaki pants and a haircut. But don't. Please don't. Please keep believing that life can be better, brighter, broader because of the art th...
I didn't think she was that kind of girl." I scampered up onto the ledge and strained to listen. "I overheard two of my students talking about her in homeroom yesterday. I never would have thought Natalie would do something like that. Then again, she...
While the bodies of young children are usually relaxed and flexible, if experiences of fear are continuous over the years, chronic tightening happens. Our shoulders may become permanently knotted and raised, our head thrust forward, our back hunched,...
[Hades] returned his attention to the playlist while I eased the car back on the road. His fingers flipped deftly over the screen. 'Orpheus...Dusk...Orpheus...Dusk...do you have anything on here that doesn't make people want to jump off a cliff?' ......
I know the rules. I've been living here longer than you have." He cracks a smile then. He nudges me back. "Hardly." "Born and raised. You're a transplant." I nudge him again, a little harder, and he laughs and tries to catch hold of my arm. I squirm ...
Which is probably one of the reasons those of us who love contemporary fiction love it as we do. We’re alone with it. It arrives without references, without credentials we can trust. Givers of prizes (not to mention critics) do the best they can, b...
It was early evening twilight when we came around a corner… and there in the road was a red deer stag. He leapt up the bank beside the road and then paused, looking back over his shoulder as we passed. Like a scene in a dream I watched him as he wa...
But whatever the form in which love appears, the lesson it teaches us is the same. We can never assimilate, never become, the beloved object. Possession is never complete, it will elude us in the end, and if we persist in our attempts to impose ourse...
Jim Crow repeated the old strategies of the reptilian powers of the air: to convince human beings simultaneously and paradoxically that they are gods and animals. In the Garden, after all, the snake approached God's image-bearer, directing her as tho...
You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you...
Last night the rain spoke to me slowly, saying, what joy to come falling out of the brisk cloud, to be happy again in a new way on the earth! That’s what it said as it dropped, smelling of iron, and vanished like a dream of the ocean into the branc...
God uses prepared vessels, no substitute. God is not looking for a rocket scientist, he's looking for those with a mind, and then he will finish the rest. It's like, 'God, here I am, send me,' and He will do the rest. He will prepare you. He will pro...
I cleaned the shit off my pink high-tops and drove home, stopping for an espresso at the coffeehouse across from the college. Men and women were hunched over copies of Jean Paul Sartre and writing in their journals. Most wore the thin-rimmed tortoise...
Though blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat—graceful, unreasonable, and impractical no matter what she was draped over—she was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians. She w...
We didn't last long after that. His room was trashed the second time I stayed there. Not that I'm neat. I knew he was. I miss him. But he knew how to hurt me with what he said or didn't say, with what he did or didn't do. I even wonder if I should cr...
The mother memories that are closest to my heart are the small gentle ones that I have carried over from the days of my childhood. They are not profound, but they have stayed with me through life, and when I am very old, they will still be near . . ....
'My problem was comparatively simple,' Marcus said. 'One kiss was enough to solve it. But that doesn't mean one kiss is enough to wake everyone up and end every nightmare. [...] That's okay,' Marcus whispered to him. 'One kiss doesn't need to be enou...
He said he'd hurt himself against a wall or had fallen down. But there was probably some other reason for the wounded, the bandaged shoulder. With a rather abrupt gesture, reaching for a shelf to bring down some photographs he wanted to look at, the ...
Vladimir stood next to one of the beams on the back porch of our new home, leaning on his back. He reached in his pocket and grabbed a pack of cigarettes, Marlboro Reds which were his favorites, and he lit one up. He was dressed all in black; black s...
nothing knee-jerk about their politics. Two out of three of them say that abortion is “always” or “usually” morally wrong. They are far more likely than voters age thirty and over to identify themselves as politically “strictly independent....
