I interviewed in an hour and didn’t have an umbrella, so I ducked inside the next door I passed. It didn’t matter what they sold, I wasn’t there to make a purchase.

Watch me sleep. Say I'm lovely, marbled-white. Pretend my forest is other to me. Pretend I am what you have made me. The sugar-almond starlet. Your virgin. Your treasure to break into. Believe me unconscious. It is you who are the dreamer. Look how those thorny…

"I would physically — not metaphorically, mind you — make love to that avocado..."

Lena jumps in Tungi’s ride, a busted Cutlass with chrome wheels and booming stereo. She hugs him, presses her chichis against his. He’s wearing too much cologne, but Lena’s glad he’s trying.

“You people remember the thing you learned in science about every action creating its own equal and opposite reaction? The same is true in other realms. All of existence is continually recycled…again and again in infinite permutations. In other words,

And on nights like those I conjure Martha's childhood, a little girl who could make the whole world fall in love with her, with those goddam big seashell eyes, enticing adults to fall into a blue-green sea that never ends, never promises survival.

Her father stuffed years worth of stories into the phone, a sort of begging: how the new dog rode in the golf cart and retrieved lost Pinnacles; how the garage’s rent was too expensive; how the doctor gave him new pills and how he had lost weight and cu

Night's air awhirl, the sky shoots fireflies. Sometimes, she bleeds black arrows in her dreams.

When Quince came rolling up into my front yard that morning, we were up to our neck in August, staring down a seventh-grade year that had crept perilously close when we weren’t looking. I’m thirty-five years clear of it now, and I can still sense Texas on

She hardly twitches. Her face regards the stars. If her body is an object, it is the isthmus before global warming. They want to find the source of the glacier in her eyes that is always melting. Maybe they like a woman who cries.

At first she kept repeating "I don’t know why he's doing this" as if the cops thought she was mixed up in it somehow. When they convinced her that all she needed to do was talk to her brother and tell him to give himself up, she looked hopeless.

Annie remembers clearly the smell of that classroom, the look and taste of it. Thirty little cruel girls, as cruel as only girls can be, sitting in rows of five.

It would wander the hallways after the 3:45 bell, after the last class, after the students had all disappeared with the homework they'd never finish, the papers they'd forget to write, after Nate the janitor pushed his broom through the endless doorways,

It was days before Parker and I could even get up the nerve to look in each others' direction at the cafe. We kept trying to avoid the other's glance. But after a time things began to soften between us. I could sense it the day the tension began to eas

The kitchen I snuck out of seventeen years before kept fading to black and white, with this layer of something between me and them.