You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.

You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

We twist our souls around each other’s miseries.

Sometimes it bursts from your imagination fully formed, sometimes you absorb from nonfiction, sometimes you're able to imprint your own autobiographical experiences on a world you never yourself were a part of. A decent number of the one-liners in the title story originally came up in conversations with my girlfriend or my neighbor.

Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.

How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?