He asked for a specific. I gave him a specific. I’m sorry it wasn’t puppies.
I was wild and tame and pulled into shreds and crushed into being all at once.
Taking risks is not being suicidal. Otherwise, skydivers need serious help.
Ronan kept staring at Whelk. He was good at staring. There was something about his stare that took something from the other person.
I felt a tickle on my skin; it took me a moment to realize that Cole was driving his die-cast Mustang up my arm. He was laughing to himself, hushed and infectious, as if there was still any reason to be quite.
She doesn’t know any better, what a girl like her needs is a man with both his legs on the land. A man who will hold her down so that she doesn’t fly away. She doesn’t know yet that someone like you looks better on the shelf than in your hand.
I whisper like the sea in the horse’s ear.
It was possible that I’d thrown one too many Molotov cocktails over God’s fence.
Sam reached his hand toward mine and I automatically put my fingers in his.
The truth is, until you know any different, the island is enough. Actually, I know different. And it’s still enough.
There doesn’t seem like there should be an artful way to butcher a cow, but there is, and this is not it.
In the night, I’ve shrunk and everyone else on the island has grown. They’re all nine feet tall and men and I’m four feet and a child. Dove, too, is a toy or possibly a dog as I lead her through the throngs of people.
The walls of the arch are covered with blood-red jellies that wink and glisten at me by the light of the moon. My father told me they were completely harmless. I don’t believe him. Nothing is completely harmless.
I’m pleased to see that the cab is cluttered with cough drop wrappers and empty milk bottles and bits of mud-smeared newspapers made brittle by age. Neatness makes me feel like I have to be on my best behavior. Clutter is my natural habitat.
I couldn’t remember the last time I hadn’t had to fake gratitude for a gift, and now that I actually was grateful, thank you didn’t seem to cut it.
My mother always said that I was born out of a bottle of vinegar instead of born from a womb and that she and my father bathed me in sugar for three days to wash it off. I try to behave, but I always go back to the vinegar.
I think every now and then about Sean’s thumb pressed against my wrist and daydream about him touching me again. But mostly I think about the way he looks at me – with respect – and I think that’s probably worth more than anything.
His face was just strange enough that she wanted to keep looking at it.
Have you heard of the legends of sleeping kings? The legends that heroes like Llewellyn and Glendower and Arthur aren’t really dead, but are instead sleeping in tombs, waiting to be woken?
When you traffic in monsters, that’s the risk you run, that you’ll find one too monstrous to stomach.