The snow was slushy, sticky, which Georgia liked because it slowed her down.
Read MoreBy summer, Sparrow and I had buried two friends, and we knew we would bury at least one more. We broke into abandoned buildings and made plans. We would run away. We would stop talking to our mothers.
But this is a ghost story, so let’s begin this one here:
Read MoreI slammed the door behind Tyson and me and all the curtains sucked in and out.
Read MoreMy stepmother, Bess, didn’t “cuss,” so when she picked me up at the college gates to take me to dinner, she acknowledged that she’d been a “b” during my last year of high school and asked if I’d been to the fried chicken place downtown. I hadn’t—not because I didn’t want to go, but because I didn’t want to suggest it to my new friends.
Read MorePeople in town had taken to calling it “that baby of Cherry’s” or just “that baby.” This was the first time he’d seen the child.
Read MoreRecognizing the American as competition, he blew poison rays at him, and Bullet moved on. On a street named Tranquility he came to a small violet house whose windows and doors were closed. He hopped the fence.
Read MoreLauren places her hand on the boy’s back to know he’s breathing, and she thinks what she’s been thinking since they left Texas—that she has no intention of being his mother.
Read MoreThe rivers had cleared up and were running blue, scouring the year’s silt from the bottoms, cleaning and scrubbing every stone. From time to time she and her father would see a bald eagle sitting in a cottonwood snag overlooking the river.
Read MoreIn the torpor of semisleep he’d been pondering how he was going to install the windows at the Beaufains’ house at ten o’clock in the morning, if, at that same hour, he was screwing Melanie McAlister.
Read MoreOther passengers were ornery and waiting bent under luggage compartments. Another man sneered at him, but James didn’t care, he was secure with himself, stamped golden with the knowledge that he was from Los Angeles, City of Angels.
Read MoreYesterday, they flew from Austin to San Francisco to take part in Jacinda’s half-sister’s wedding. This evening, they rehearse.
Read MoreHe puts down the receiver. What to do? He has to call his other daughter. He should tell his wife first. But his wife’s dead, so what’s he thinking?
Read MoreAfterward she went outside in her dress to show off her legs. I watched her prancing for a while among the stones, until the game made her forget, it seemed, that it had all happened, that she had grown up a little more than the rest of them.
Read MoreHe watched as shadows crept down the street and the glistening black turned slowly dull. Twenty years earlier he would have reached for his camera, attempting to turn what he saw as banality into what he saw as art.
Read MoreHe was playing the lawyer, he was smoking him, from the start, Cola said. He was smoking him, and the foreign girl, there, was helping him.
Read More