The way he looks at me makes me ache, but it isn’t fair. He hurt me first. He caused this ache from the start. This inside out, churning pain that feels mental and physical now. I fiddle with my hands, peering up at him again, and all I can think i...
She tried to think of what to say to make it all better again, or at least the way it was before she'd made her confession, though she didn't regret having confessed. Perhaps that was what had been wrong with her all along. Now that the lie wasn't be...
Once inside I stripped off my clothes and showered. Refreshed, I pick up my phone and type. ME: I want you. Come over now if you feel the same way. I held my breath as a I waited for a response but after several minutes none came. Maybe he wasn't goi...
How many ways can I say “I love you”? I could say it in another language, like French. I could say it through action, like a kiss. Or I could say it indirectly, like telling your best friend, April. Yes, I think I’m ready to tell April I love h...
A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel at the way each has the power to forever alter an individual's compass. And it is the kn...
a) he's late. b) he's acting like an asshole and blowing me off. c)he's gotten into a horrible car crash that's left dead. The most likely answer is A. (We went to prom together, and the limo had to wait in his driveway for half an hour. At the end o...
My wife died of someone trying to help her. He helped her find her way off a bridge and into a chained and locked metal trunk. Then he had the audacity to not accept a coupon when I went to pay him for his services rendered.
With total rapture and delight he talks about the birds which he can see from his prison window, and which he had never noticed before, when he was a minister. Now of course, after he's been released, he doesn't notice the birds anymore, just as befo...
I will put my hook in thy nose and my bridle in thy lips, and I will turn thee back by the way which thou camest. ‘Destroyer’ thou hast embraced, and Abaddon shalt thou be. From the furnace of the Kiln wast thou taken and to the furnace of Hell s...
Because she left him a MySpace message that was semi-flirty, and then today he was very vague about what he was doing. So I headed over to his house and waited outside until he left. And now he’s at McDonald’s, and I’m following him to see wher...
I started to sway Lexi again when I realized she was quiet. Waiting. Both of us paused on the cusp of the unknown. I couldn't go backward or even retrace my own steps, let alone Xanda's. I could only go forward. The threads of time weren't unraveling...
I want to name one of my kids “I’ll-Have-A-Large-Cheeseburger.” That way, when I show up at McDonald's with my kids and the person behind the counter asks me what I want I’ll say, “I’ll-Have-A-Large-Cheeseburger, what do you want?” And ...
In middle school I used to draw letters of the alphabet out of contorted torsos, bodies, arms, legs. A rigid torso with one arm and one leg extended at straight angles out would form a “K,” for example. But then I realized how silly that was. Peo...
Later, months later, when Jude thought back to the way it all went down -how did a burnout like him end up straight edge?- he'd remember that ambulance, just like the one he'd been unconscious inside. Its red cross, when viewed from the right angle, ...
I got words in me, Jess, fighting to find a way out. Sometimes there's so many words and they get so crowded in my skull I think my head is gonna explode. I want to write them down. I've tried, but most of the time my thoughts and my feelings are big...
He had never been interested in stories at any age, and had never quite understood the basic concept. He'd never read a work of fiction all the way through. He did remember, as a small boy, being really annoyed at the depiction of Hickory Dickory Doc...
I wanted to kiss her, she was beautiful again to me. But I dared not risk it. It wasn't only that I would have frightened her, it was that the desire to kill her was almost overpowering. Some fierce purely male instinct in me wanted to claim her now ...
I want you any way I can get you. Not because you’re beautiful or clever or kind or adorable, although devil knows you’re all those things. I want you because there’s no one else like you, and I don’t ever want to start a day without seeing y...
Power,' as the sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda writes, 'enters the picture in two ways': the first entails constructing and legitimizing the moral system itself; the second, in enforcing it. In this view, 'deviants are those who simply do not have eno...
Confucians, along with Hebrew, Islamic, and Catholic scholastics, as well as Protestant fundamentalists, are like tourists who study guidebooks and maps instead of wandering freely and looking at the view. Speech and writing are undoubtedly marvelous...
I see... the way you're always searching. How much you hate anything fake or phony. How you're older than your years, but still... playful, like a little girl. How you're always looking into people, or wondering what they see when they look back at y...
