She was petite, pear-shaped, white, the girlfriend of a friend who'd done his degree in Russian Literature, but that's not the only reason I liked him. The husband I had for a while traveled whether he needed to or not and so I'd go with Julie and Phillip to movies,…

You are a boy with a birthday bike smiling like our son, standing in a photograph surrounded by other sons, who turn rocks over and over, who keep snakes in plastic bread bags, who find the bones of something wild in the woods. You smile that way still.

Henry yells at her when she lights cigarettes and candles. But this is her small secret ritual, her way of making good with the god she is no longer sure she believes in...

I feel a strange loneliness for her...I think I will go to the beach, and forgive it for its sharp sand and lack of trees.

Dale of the threadbare corduroy blazer and the same two plaid button-down shirts, of the unkempt beard and short-shorn hair and holed ears, the plugs overloose and then lost so that the effect was not a toughening edginess, but deformity, the same self-in

Daddy? Yes, hun. What do you think about life? Did you ask your mother? I'm asking you. (lowers newspaper) Well, (squinting eyes) life gives you so much pumpkin. ! and (like a whip) and..? (brows almost touching the hairline)…

There was dad sitting at the table, wide awake, reading glasses on nose, pen in hand above a Doppler graph of numbers on paper, one of many now-lost theorems, looking up as his son walked into the room.

He disliked intrusion and very specifically innocuous intrusion, nice guys, one might say, who tried to be near him to learn something from him or who admired him but who, as in that passage, came merely to disturb his work.

Everything is illuminated. If anyone is watching, we look happy.

We see o­nly the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material . . . when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of things…

“You’ll have to do better than that,” Skip says. My husband laughs. He has a high girlish chuckle when he’s truly delighted. He can sing really high like a girl, too. “All right,” I say. I leave my headband

“Charlie was right about you, Nan,” she said in a voice of pure defeat. “You are a gentle spirit. And probably too good for people like us.”

Before I was 18 years old, in my small home town of Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Canada, I invented the designer jean...

an old Black woman, a sequined black cap poised on the left of her crown of black infused gray hair.  A gray wool shawl that seemed to perfectly match her hair's color wrapped her all the way down to her hips, where a battered pair of blue jeans rested

Whole frogs are/ too difficult.