Sex scenes in books are always like first person, from this male perspective and just about how awesome he is. It feels like such a fantasy.

It is the strain of walking around the world-down the street, riding city buses and elevators, moving from place to place to place-and not knowing who might want to destroy you, who might like to fill your heart with poison, who might rob you and stab you, who might stand above you in the dark with a tarantula.

It is what we see when we imagine what the afterlife must be like: our happiest triumphs, our most sincere moments, stolen from the seam of our lives, a respite just before the onset of imminent tragedy.

Sex scenes in books are always like first person, from this male perspective and just about how awesome he is. It feels like such a fantasy.

An act of evil is the death of wonder

Maybe that's why people have friends at all. Not because they like them so much but because they don't make them feel so much worse.

After school the very next day, El Rey's mobile home was gone. I laid in bed and wondered what happens to people when they go, if they become like shadows, if they fade away when they disappear from your life. The only thing I could see was the broken picket fence. The only sound I could hear was the cry of birds being killed in the night.