That spring the war still moved north but we did not go to it any longer.

Now they are sleeping in a poppy field, sun-drenched warm afternoon girls lying on their stomachs and sides, faces in flowers, and flowers blowing, blowing. If this afternoon were every afternoon, the world would be cured.

The particles of dust didn't want to be looked at

The shoreline was further inland than he remembered, a good thirty feet or so since his last visit. He stood in waist deep water — the waves of the emerald green Gulf tumbling upon his pale white torso. He had always been disappointed with the beach as a child.…

"... I knew Willie had gone— out the back door or out the side window. I knew he probably slipped over the fence behind my house into Lou C.’s backyard..."

All through their descent sequence K’var had nervous premonitions.

Listen to him barking in the night. Fear shifts on the bed next to you, hogging the covers. Stare at the ceiling and wonder what to do. Forget his birthday. Forget he is forty-two. Forget the phone call from Berkeley twenty-one years…

In time's embroidery, the human storyis a short stretch of a short strand within the thread of half a knot-and that stretch of strand's defective. What will mourn us when we're gone?Not the plants which live so lightly on the earth.Not the scorpions and not the ants.Perhaps…

Things looked way too normal to be normal. The cold, gliding black eyed swans never once straying far from each other's wake, the cute blue jeaned lovers everyone secretly watched carefully picking their trickling way over small odd rocks and…

The apple his slightly necrophiliac kiss saved her from soaks in the petrified sun, turned to leather, like a screaming skull of summer in its glass enactment case.

Jimmy Gollihue awoke to the howling of a bloodhound ...

I try to slot into order the sequence of events: the book deal that appeared and then winked away like a dying star, the white gloves and the brick through Waterstone's window; my novel lying in the shop front in a bed of glass.

We never meant to gain their confidence only to outgrow them. They were once our best friends, the ones who listened, the ones who understood or sat across from us so we could see them nod. They leaned…

If you’re Frederick in this moment, you are watching from that balcony and start to scream your fool head off. Maybe you just think you scream, and you might have screamed, but what you really do is clutch at your chest, black dots spanning each eyeball,

“I thought bankruptcy was for people who didn’t have any money.” Skipper said. “Not exactly. It takes a lot of money to go broke,” I said, hoping to teach him an important lesson about thrift.