Myrna woke up with a start and sensed a strange silence in the air. She quickly flipped on an electric switch and when the lights came on she breathed a sigh of relief. Dawn was just breaking so she went back to bed and pulled the comforter over her head.

I read the last line and close the book with a smack. “That ends that section,” I tell him. “Coming up is the chapter titled ‘The Ancient History of the Sewers of Paris.'

We fucked in the backseat like the verse of a b-side, and that was enough to make him think my boys were half of his body.

He (after learning of my former occupation as a record store owner): So, what is your favorite band of all time?

That evening I sat and watched the sunset. The color of the water changed from blue to black. The sky turned from pink to star-spangled ebony. There was no moon.

No one explained triumph would feel like this.

Fred, who by that point had already wanted to call Jimmy "Jim," talked a river. Jimmy, who had already called her Freddy, took a mojo bag from his back pants pocket and asked her to write something that he could put inside.

fun fact: a doll's legs will twitch while being scalped but only for just a little bit

She saw mana from the pendant floating to her chest and its resonance pulsed with her heart, yet it felt empty. Unaware of what she had done, she reached out to it, thought of a name, and called for it.

Hanging was back and thriving - twice a week at half seven in the evening.

Oh what fun they had riding that bike! What adventures! They went everywhere, in town and out.

My resistance sublimates. There is a long instant of absolute relinquishment, in which I imagine droplets of water plinking into my lungs in a slow, musical fashion, like icicles melting in a perfect cave.

(Insert poignant line here)

I think that I write toward death and to stave off death and to remember the dead and to address what is dead in me.

Go to your room. Children are meant to be seen not heard.