For me, family means the silent treatment. At any given moment, someone is always not speaking to someone else.' Really,' I said. We're passive-aggressive people,' she explained, taking a sip of her coffee. 'Silence is our weapon of choice. Right now...
Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up the stairs. 'Where d'you think you're going?'Our father gripped the bann...
Where are we going?” Desandra asked. “We’re going to Blue Ribbon Stables,” I said. “It’s the closest place to rent a horse. “Why?” Desandra asked. “Because I can’t keep up with you on foot,” I said. “And she runs like a rhino....
We should expect nothing less from the language that was originally given by God, to His human family. Hebrew was the method that God chose for mankind to speak to Him, and Him to them. Adam spoke Hebrew—and your Bible confirms this. Everyone who g...
Long after our cities are condemned and deserted, our city parks will stand as a testament of the serenity of our weekends to distant trespassers. As we wait in the bushes to embrace their heavy garments, the trespassers may think, cuddling themselve...
Yes, an actual full-sized camel. If you find that confusing, just think how the criosphinx must have felt. Where did the camel come from, you ask? I may have mentioned Walt’s collection of amulets. Two of them summoned disgusting camels. I’d met ...
It was told to me, it was in a manner forced on me by the very person herself whose prior engagement ruined all my prospects, and told me, as I thought, with triumph. This person's suspicions, therefore, I have had to oppose by endeavouring to appear...
What did you see when you died?" He has that tenative half smile, like he's almost embarrassed by what he's saying. "Because I'm guessing it wasn't the Sea of Tranquility." And when I look at him, I'm not so sure it wasn't. “Where did you go?" His ...
She’s contemplative; I can feel the air around her thick with her thoughts. “No,” she says at last, “I want to believe you’re being sincere but I know you’re not. So I say no, because even if I allow myself to fantasize a little about our...
The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in faili...
It's been the longest time Since I've been in this place, Where I spend my whole day Hoping I'll see your face. Then I script things to say, And maybe what you'd say back. You don't know it yet, But, girl, it's a fact That I can see us Staying up lat...
That's enough Susy, nuff, nuff.' 'No, no I just want to say this,' she gasped, on the brink of incoherence. 'His eyes, his face, it's not ugly, and I know if I go back that he'll come and get some more of me... Even when he has drained all I know and...
Towards the end of the Second World War, when I was sixteen years old, I was taken out of school and forced into the army. After a brief period of training at a base in Wüzburg, I arrived at the front, which by that time had already crossed the Rhin...
It was fun to see him becoming sententious again, glorying in a science he had invented, and as positive as a village soothsayer. 'So one should neither give nor receive?' I laughed. 'And if the lover is poor, his mistress indigent, then both she and...
And, really, she did like Chandler, too. She did. What woman wouldn’t? He was handsome and successful, a member of one of Nashville’s oldest and most prominent families. But she’d never felt anything more than a friendly sort of affection for h...
Chapter One of My Life. I walk down the street. There's a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost. I am helpless. It isn't my fault. It still takes forever to find a way out. Chapter Two. I walk down the same street. There's a deep hole in th...
If this were a fairy tale, this would be the part where the fishboy appears and Diana shoots him through the heart. Because he is a tragic hero, he's our fucking Gatsby, and he lived for his fish and he has to die for his fish. He would never let my ...
Imagine a very long time passing - and I find my way out, following someone who already knows how to leave Hell. And God says to me on Earth for the first time, "Xas!" in a tone of discovery, as if I'm a misplaced pair of spectacles or a stray dog. A...
You have any complaints or comments, you direct them to me. If you call and harass Granddad again, I'll do whatever I can, legally, to revoke that trust fund you've been living off of for the last thirty years." "You have no right to—" "No, you hav...
Sometimes we are written down in books. Or, someone tells a story in which our name figures. And so we live on, through someone else’s voice… These are the indelible marks others make of us, like the watermarks of high tides, names carved into ba...
IN ONE IMPORTANT WAY, an abusive man works like a magician: His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. He draws you into focusing on the t...
