His legs, now unsplinted but as crooked and ugly as something glimpsed through a rip in the canvas of a freak-show tent, hung down. The left, with the salt-dome where the knee had been, was fully four inches shorter than the right. He had tried stand...
It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness,...
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...
I read a lot of travel books before I came here. Fantasised what it would be like. I read Scott’s journal. Those last entries as they froze to death in that tent. ‘Had we lived, I should have made a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and co...
If the quality of my Christianity lies in my ability to be more inclusive than the next pastor, things get tricky because I will always, always encounter people—intersex people, Republicans, criminals, Ann Coulter, etc.—whom I don't want in the t...
I’m much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my thinking to action. I don’t work that way. I work with tentative ideas and I experiment and then with that experimentation in action, I final...
So, is it too young for you?" He leaned over, lips coming to mine, arms pulling me into a kiss, soft at first, tentative, then ... wow. The guy could kiss. I finally had to pull back to catch my breath. "Good answer?" he said. "Yep. You like them you...
She hugs me. It's tentative at first, a little scared, and yes, a little repulsed, but then she melts into it. She rests her head against my cold neck and embraces me. Unable to believer what's happening, I put my arm around her and just hold her. I ...
You have chastised me, demeaned me and dismantled me, before bringing me back to life. Who would have thought all of this was possible in a grotty cubicle of the men’s room? You hold me there for some time whilst we both catch our breath. Tentative...
Mom," Nathan called to her. Daisy pulled her gaze from the tent and the fleeting glimpse of Jack's bare back, the smooth planes and indent of his spine, the sliver of the white elastic just above the blue waistband of his jeans..."Hmm?" "What's a faa...
She gave her husband such a night of sexual pleasure that his eyes followed her constantly after that, narrow and hot. He grew molten when she passed near other men, and at night they made their own shaking tent. They got teased too much and moved fa...
Young women today feel vulnerable to judgment; if a harsh sentence is passed (or even suspected or projected), it is not her reputation that suffers so much as the stability of her moral universe. They did not have long to explore the sexual revoluti...
My brothers’ faces haunt me. I hear their children, my nieces and nephews, asking me why I came home without their daddies. I think of their wives, imagine their questions. Our parents, forever seeing the faces of their lost sons when they look at ...
Do you know what Ed Gein said about women?" [...] "'When I see a pretty girl walking down the street I think two things. One part of me wants to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet and treat her right.'" I stop finish my J&B in on...
I would have written you, myself, if I could put down in words everything I want to say to you. A sea of ink would not be enough.” “But you built me dreams instead,” Celia says, looking up at him. “And I built you tents you hardly ever see. I...
The patter of tentative footfalls reached my ears. I flipped on my side to face the door and saw Ansel wander by. I rolled onto my back, rubbing sleep from my eyes. I'd crashed on my bed as soons as I'd gotten back from school, collapsing under the w...
It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled, dead eyes staring out at you and n...
We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in th...
Believe me, I know. I used to think that it only happened once, your single opportunity to make good. But now I think - no, know - that love is abundant. That's Glorianna's gift to us. That we love, over and over, many times and many people. You're o...
But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing o...
One must consider that small children are virtually incapable of making much impact on their world. No matter what path taken as a child, survivors grow up believing they should have done something differently. Perhaps there is no greater form of sur...
