She had us trade cardigans. She said it was an exercise in empathy. 

Toward the end, when heart disease had already taken my father, and my mother was alone—which she found intolerable—her doctors felt she had dementia. But I knew that was not the case. She had always

He was in love with his friend Faye, had known her since elementary school.

If you get this far, that means that things are all, more or less, going according to plan.

I was only doing what she asked:  Not listening. 

The Christian Movie Theatre is mainly for fans of poorly translated morality tales, the violent ends of saints and so forth.

Despite your better judgement, you click on his profile and then on the most recent post: a picture of him smiling on a white slope with his arm wrapped around a remarkably average, yet still somehow traditionally hot (not pretty, just hot) snow bunny.

There was something that she wished to start, and when she started it, she figured, her life would take on new meaning. But in this moment in time, she ate breakfast bars all hours of the day and worried about money.

I count the number of murderers in the class.

Nick your shin shaving, stare idly at the blood coursing down your foot and down the drain, and maybe this is how you do it, empty out all your insides until your shapeless skin is all that’s left.

I wanted to be “that girl,” but my new high-waisted pants from the Marais were already unbuttoned once.

Brian was psyched too. Not about her requests—Tom Waits was more his groove—but about where things seemed to be headed.

I have my tee already halfway over my head, blocking my eyes, when I feel a hand on my forearm, yanking me toward the other end of the field. “You can’t do that. Put it back on.”

To be naked on the beach after a storm is something special—the salt and the petrichor and the hum of being unsettled that maybe the torrential rains caused damage, that maybe there were nearby ships that will never make it to harbor.

Violet and I sit in her bed a while and talk. She shows me how to unhook and snake a bra through a sleeve.

“When Zac started writing the poems, I didn’t think it would get to this.”

“Foresee this, I did not,” Yoda commiserated. But he knew what he had to do. He just didn’t know if he could do it. 

By now I have learned that sometimes, as Tricia pummels away at the backs of my thighs, I can tolerate a memory or two of George.

Under what circumstances do we find ourselves here?

“Yvonne?” she called out. 

when encountering the duckrabbit ... 

By the time he’d arrived at the Atwell Park Summer Solstice Festival, Bill Hannan was so high he mistook one of the paper lanterns hanging from the red-lit oak tree at the center of the park for the moon. 

This was months ago. April, maybe May. The weather was foggy. So was my brain. I saw you again in the Cubism section. I was standing in front of “The Actor” by Picasso. The second I saw you, I smiled

"You won’t let me love you, so I am loving this plant,” he says.

We do Christmas Eve at our mom’s.