A flower is your cousin...Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken's or a hog's when you need it...But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower. Cherokee great-grandmother

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.

Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had. But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

The past is all we know of the future.