I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.

I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.

My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.

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

Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.