you tell a stranger's story...

My father seems anxious about my gender orientation. I grew up looking like a boy, acting like a boy. He bought dresses and girly stuff for me but he avoided making an issue of it until recently.

"You're no good at sex, no good at drugs and, god knows, no good at rock and roll."

Neither you nor I is old enough, of course, to remember that America’s most popular athlete once was a horse.

Sebastian and Janice had been a natural match. They sought to deny this at first because a recovery assistance program was not a place to forge intimate relationships. It worked out wonderfully in Hollywood, but Hollywood, as everyone knew, was just a facade. So…

You don't have to push back so hard. We wore our hair long. We wanted the animals to trust us in their wild open spaces. Everything will come undone. We wore our hair long because we wanted to Be able to find our way home in the dark…

If I remember him at all it’s because I decided not to flunk him so he could graduate. I had this theory that teachers should be bound by the same oath as doctors, First, do no harm.

...and on the eighth day

When I look at the picture on my refrigerator, I always think the same thing: "Hitler was a baby once too, look how well he turned out."

My sixth grade teacher used to tell us all the time about how being poor is nowhere near the same as liv­ing in poverty.

My beloved lets me crawl into bed and put my feet on him since his skin is warm and hot like a fire roaring from within his soft flesh.

Frenchie hustled waffle irons.

Smiling at stones and chunks of earth pounding in...

blackberry pie and huckleberry wine and litte Maria with her summerset bangs

He draped the sheet over her body. Blood spotted the fabric, rose petals on snow.He left the pistol, but pocketed the first edition she'd signed. Part of his fee.In the park, he ditched the glasses, fake mustache, and anorak before making the call.The publisher called an…