The summer before cancer—the summer of the boy/friend, the summer before Max started high school, the summer when all the decisions about blowing apart their marriage were made—they drove to Martha's Vineyard. Astrid had insisted she wasn't going, rig

"He doesn't have a parish," I said. "He works in a hospital in the East Bay. He told me that if I were in that hospital and I woke up and saw him, I was in big trouble."

"What's that smell?" Osama glares at me from the front seat of the Trans Am. "What smell?" I say. "You smell like a diaper. Are you wearing a diaper?" Osama and Peach both laugh at me. "No... maybe, its my Baby Soft perfume. Is it too strong?"

He returned to America on the Fourth of July. Twisting in his cramped window seat miles above the Atlantic, he buckled up before the descent. “You can handle this,” he muttered. Hungover, still reeling from the dreamy head-turning experience of…

I turn up the music and slip into drone, rock it like a tunnel in canary. When that does not erase his face, I cup my breast with one hand and let my hair fall.

My name is Lu-chen Wyatt, and I have watched this tomb for seven years with undying loyalty. Tomorrow I am going away, and I wish to set down the story of my leaving and to say goodbye to Set-Yi, whose burial place has been my home for so long.

There's a man sitting in my room holding a jar of my ashes. That's what he claims.

fire rolls through the drive-thru

Oh, and take off all your jewelry unless you want your relatives sifting you through a window screen looking for your diamond.

In the beginning the revolution was all motion and energy. When the President for Life resigned motion and energy disappeared with the sounds of clapping hands.

Over our short, yet enduring relationship, I found that he was desperately trying to reconcile his ambitions with his situation. I left and he continued to be unhappy, trying to "fix" what he now realized had been broken all along. In the end, a span of a

No! No! Nonononono!

The book mind, just like its namesake the book, is capable of movement only after its assembly: otherwise, it boasts no moving parts.

Newhouse returned his gaze to his wet palm, which he lifted to his nose with suspicion, sniffed again and again, then struggled to move out from under the growing stream.

His mother was not an aw-come-here-honey-and-give-me-a-hug type mom. She was the kind of mother who, if you had some kind of problem, would suggest that perhaps it might be a good idea to volunteer (she was really big on volunteering) at some sort of orga