He’s hooked on the pinball / excitements of adolescence

We are a funny story, my brother and I. Twins of Africa in a kitchen on wheels the size of a cupboard, we serve tourists baguettes and pain au chocolat, in the gardens adjoining the square where the tricoteuses did their knitting, heads were chopped and..

"This is where the children play," the woman said cheerily. She gestured toward the flat bed of a pickup truck. The edge was surrounded by a makeshift wooden fence that looked like it had been made out of old orange crates.

... while I lie, cool as a nectar cream snowball, in my Maggie The Cat slip, painting my toenails a color called Bad Influence

The city's hung in flashlights.

“Spare change?” he asked the couple heading into the cineplex. They glanced at his brother, saw something was wrong with him, then at him, noting his dirty and disheveled state. They passed without a word, not even a head-shake.

I. When I was young, my best friend was only three inches high. He was chubby, always cheerful, and very funny. He didn't start out as anything much. I always imagined he came into being in a small factory, in China, at the mercy of two small, yellow hands and a …

Our banter has shifted, like wading from the shallow to the deep end. He taps his foot. “Your underwear reminded me of my grandma’s underwear.”

Walking in to work from an unfamiliar direction, I saw her, on a street I had never been down before. I was coming from his place, for the first time, after the first time. The first time, but not the first date. That's not me. I'm not one to... not one who... He worked…

The debits and credits of life have been recalculated. You are not due tax; you are owed a trapeze. It turns out you have a natural gift for hanging upside down, knees to the clouds.

Was Sligo an unfeeling privacy-violator or an uncannily-feeling empath, privy to the deepest longings of those whose lives he came in contact with? [...] Sligo's grave is as silent as these pages ultimately would be if they were left unread.

Let's be honest. Ugly people have an uphill battle in this culture. From the time they slide out of their ugly mothers they stand at the plate with two strikes.

I wanted to sit in class in Iowa next to Flannery as she recited that first story that stopped the world with an accent so dense with dogwood we had to strain to collect every word.

Because they boil bananas and I fry them.

The patient people who work with the insane are not my kind of people. They are too entertained by the oddness of the inmates and act with a superior sense. I, on the other hand, am odd myself, searching for adherents to my view. The inmates knew me as such and agreed…