The lie came out so easily it frightened me. I used to feel sick to my stomach when I heard Mother tell a lie. How can you do it? How do you live with yourself? I used to wonder. But here I was, lying to Miss Paulsen and smiling while doing it.
It amazed me how some people could touch an instrument and create something so beautiful, and when others tried, like me, it just sounded like mangled noise.
We all laced together – a brothel madam, an English professor, a mute cook, a quadroon cabbie, and me, the girl carrying a bucket of lies and throwing them like confetti.
Willie said normal was boring and that I should be grateful that I had a touch of spice. She said no one cared about boring people, and when they died, they were forgotten, like something that slips behind the dresser.
I stared at the enormous homes, the landscaping and flower beds immaculate. It was as if dollar bills, instead of leaves, hung from the trees.
If I poured all the lies I had told into the Mississippi, the river would rise and flood the city.
Somehow I had to turn the salted peanuts in the cigar box into petits fours.
I looked down at the little pink face in the bundle. A newborn. The child had been alive only minutes but was already considered a criminal by the Soviets.
Charlie Marlowe never wrote horror, but somehow horror was writing Charlie Marlowe.
I’m a binge writer. I work in the music business fulltime, in artist management and developing songwriters and recording artists, and so juggling my job I carve out as much time as I can on the weekends.
But wasn’t there some sort of rule that said parents had to be smarter than their kids? It didn’t seem fair.
My sister and brother are both writers as well. We are constantly discussing story and plot lines. And I love to discuss story ideas with my husband.
New Orleans is unlike any city in America. Its cultural diversity is woven into the food, the music, the architecture – even the local superstitions. It’s a sensory experience on all levels and there’s a story lurking around every corner.
How did I get here How did I end up in the arms of a boy I barely knew but knew I didn’t want to lose I wondered what I would have thought of Andrius in Lithuania. Would I have liked him Would he have liked me.
Sometimes kindness can be delivered in a clumsy way. But it’s far more sincere in its clumsiness than those distinguished men you read about in books. Your father was very clumsy.
What was life asking of me? How could I respond when I didn’t know the question?
I shut the bathroom door and caught sight of my face in the mirror. I had no idea how quickly it was to change, to fade. If I had, I would have stared at my reflection, memorizing it. It was the last time I would look into a real mirror for more than a decade.
You stand for what is right, Lina, without the expectation of gratitude or reward.
I wasn’t certain of anything anymore, except that New Orleans was a faithless friend and I wanted to leave her.
You like me, Josie Moraine. You just don’t know it yet.
Was it harder to die, or harder to be the one who survived?