Then I read Journey’s first page.

Storm clouds dangle from the sky, the colour and consistency of wet cotton. Way back in the nineties, when long plastic sausages of cotton discs were a luxury that only the cornucopian West could

I would talk to the doll, then it would talk back to me, reflecting me to myself. And then I’d adjust my behavior accordingly. And, eventually, become a better, less annoying person. It’s kind of genius in a way?

Under a contrived knit brow, his eyes aimlessly drifted among a thicket of words, until they happened to stop on depling, noun, German to Middle English, a child born to older parents, and thus he found a new label for himself, more succinct than his mother’s change-of-life baby and less piercing than faggot, which Joey Novakis and his friends would blurt as they passed him in the school hallways.

A furious hellhound runs at her. Katja kicks this final test away. Lashes a heel into the beast’s sternum. And she feels nothing. Numbed somehow inside her phalanx of a thousand suns. Only rags and ragged breathing, one of her eyes damaged red to melting: She feels nothing.

You were familiar with this posture, of a girl waiting for someone to notice her not notice them.

There are times when you just want to go up to no one in particular, and say, “Fuck you and the nutsack that held nightmare-you for x amount of time,” even if, and perhaps especially when, the eventual target is your own face.

I have a dream, after selling this book, someone asks me what it’s about. I explain and they say,  So, the narrator is still pining after Finn? They put emphasis on the word ‘still.’

Ethan had saved $100,000 for his trip. I had $8,000.

Men are tyrants with their time; but women are tyrants with the eternal.

I rotate my foot like a hot dog and I dare myself not to scratch. I let them land on collarbone skin, thighs, the sponge under my left eye. I’ve always been like this. I’ve always had small tits. You know what they call those.

I’ve always wanted someone to tell me what I want, to sell me on a life I want to live.

Wafts of ancient loam and wet wood. He had viewed it all with sickening fascination, the swiftness with which something so solid could be torn asunder, cored completely.

Literature is happening all of the time, all around us, all at once.

I was driving down the freeway listening to Third Eye Blind way too loud

Bobby was going down, not on a woman or a man but fast and with extreme force into the frost covered asphalt of a Holiday Inn parking lot, five minutes from the Detroit airport.

My father is talking fast, telling me how the redhead is waiting for him.

Once her parents were reliably asleep she helped herself to a long hot shower, a respite which was what she imagined drugs must be like.

“Must have been rich kids,” says Al. “A lot harder to make money staying anonymous.”

It all started with a wrong clap. I remember that because Dave was saying that when she was born, her dad got mad that she clapped on the 1 and the 3 and not the 2 and the 4. He was clapping weird.

The thing about Grandma is that she seems to show up unannounced and she doesn’t care about the substance of the prayers, just that they end in Amen.

 I know Max is probably hard by the time we get to the overlook at the dam. He puts the car in park and tells me he mixed a cd, just for me, because I’m so special.

- I can’t believe this is

As a young boy, I lived in the Bronx in the mid-1980s during a time when it was infamous for its squalor, a third-world dilapidation captured in movies like Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. I remember

The sleet has stopped but the cold is something unthinkable. It lends a deathly permanence to the still, heavy darkness. I stand shivering on the sidewalk and look up at the Hollywood sign. I try to

The boys stood in the vacant lot outside the convenience store, which was closed today due to a special occasion. There was even a sign on the door. Armando was getting high again. Stew was quiet.