They were goldfish, and not even the pretty kind: they weren’t even really yellow, more like the color of the roots of your teeth, more like the color of a pus-glazed mosquito bite.

The moon came out, riding on a motorbike, his head hatted, silver-blue, attached.

We compiled our snacks and made for the playhouse basement.

Fuck you.

I never kissed another man, but I danced for one once.

“Baby Cakes.” I don’t think she has ever called me that.

There is nothing, Lois says, gayer than spelunking.

He wondered, "What if I never get out of the shower?" and just like that he never did.

Being able to walk in a straight line is not something Yoda had ever taught himself to appreciate. The sidewalks on Coruscant, on Alderaan, even on Kashyyyk, they took the user where they wanted to go...

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The crazy girls are the ones that won’t disappear.

Every day we both live.

There were no ways around. There was reverse, but that was its own failure.

She is thinking that when you make love, your brain opens, and everyone knows what you are thinking, and you know what everyone else is thinking, so your husband knows what you are thinking and can control you.

They had taken up four of the ten seats in the sushi restaurant, and the smallness of the room made them serious and giddy, as if they were being admitted to a secret.

Greg listened to hold music while rereading the suicide note.

I told him about Nebraska and how it was a dried up ancient ocean bed, how farmers harvested corn and clicks, how there might be kings buried under the freshly tilled soil or angels who dusted the August crops.

When the ground thaws and the air grows thin, the boys come crawling out of the valley to your doorstep at the foot of Mount Rose.

 It was weird seeing him without a hair wrap, without roller blades, his uniform in college, weird seeing him instead in a pastel button-up.

We’d read in a tour book that the Moscow clubs had shoe and face policies, which meant your shoes had to be killer and your face had to be hot...

Shaving his neck to impress...

She imagined walking barefoot across the grass in the backyard, sitting in the hammock and reading that book her teacher from graduate school had published.

The landscape was a flat dimension, no mountains or hills. Farmland and ramshackle homes that looked like collages, you could see the years in them.

I saw her in front of us then, and she struck me: white parka down to mid-calf meeting white Ugg boots, white hood drawn over head.

Usually I’d just as soon look away from cruelty, but Lemuel flung that chicken square at my face and my first instinct was to swat her, fretting her clipped wings and shrieking like a raspy old woman, down on the heads of the others. Simple reflex.