All around us the same words are being spoken, like a ribbon that sews its way through a crowd, a drawstring pulling everyone together.
I love that she’s tough as nails one moment and soft as suede the next.
I can’t believe you’re making jokes while I’m freaking out.
The zebras are the first stop in the Roger Williams Zoo. Of all the animals in the Africa section, these have always been my favorite. I can give or take the elephants; I can never find the cheetah-but the zebras captivate me. They’d be one of the few things that would fit if we were lucky enough to live in a world that’s black and white.
The village, without bread, grew bitter. There was nothing to break at the table with family, to digest over conversation.
Information in the ghetto traveled now like a wisteria vine: twisted, convoluted, and blooming from time to time with unlikely bursts of color.
Be a mensch, my mother told me, no matter what situation you’re in. Be kind to others before you take care of yourself; make whoever you’re with feel like they matter.
Does it even mean anything to him anymore? If you say the same words over and over, do they become so bleached that there’s no color left in them?
I didn’t want to be treated like him,” Josie said, answering her mother, when what she really meant was, I wasn’t brave enough.
I do what I do best. I move in the opposite direction.
In every fairy tale, the only way out is to keep running forward. To never look back.
The papers were caught between our bodies, a wedge to drive us apart, like any other lie.
Chosen protection.
Of course, that’s not really accurate,” Dr. DeSantos says. “The future is going to come, in some form, whether we like it or not. What we really mean is that we can’t plan for the future. And when we can’t plan – when we can’t find those patterns that make sense – we lose the skeleton of life. And no one can remain upright without that.
Life was what happened when all the what-if’s didn’t, when what you dreamed or hoped or – in this case – feared might come to pass passed by instead. Alex had spent enough nights thinking of good fortune, of how it was thin as a veil, how seamlessly you might stream from one side to the other.
In my first memory, I am three years old and I am trying to kill my sister.
I look around at the curl of clouds in the sky, the sun glittering on the ocean in the distance. A picture postcard. Just a few hundred miles away this virus is killing people so fast that they don’t have room for bodies, but you would never know it from where I stand.
Best friends,” she said. We pressed our hands together, a promise sealed in blood. I knew it didn’t work this way, because I had studied biology at Gymnasium, but I liked the thought of Darija’s blood running through my veins. It made it easier to believe I was keeping a piece of her with me.
How come the people who don’t even notice you exist are the ones you can’t stop thinking about?
A pirate walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder, a peg leg, and a steering wheel on his pants,” Derek said. “The bartender says, ‘Hey, you’ve got a steering wheel on your pants.’ And the pirate goes, ‘Arrrgh, I know. It’s driving me nuts.