What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.

I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.

A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.

Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.

I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.

A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It went on and on, until my own lungs were burning. “What bird are you calling?” I asked finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer. The Bird Man stopped whistling. He grinned, so that I could see all his pebbly teeth. “You.

If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.