It was a tiny sound but it woke me up because it was a human sound.

It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.

The word God asks a question and then answers it before there is any chance to wonder.

Would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone.

In my paranoid world every storekeeper thinks I’m stealing, every man thinks I’m a prostitute or a lesbian, every woman thinks I’m a lesbian or arrogant, and every child and animal sees the real me and it is evil.

I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.

He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done. I expelled my dust, the powder of everything I had destroyed with doubt, and he pulled it into his lungs.