Fiction

I’m alive, Sarah thinks, the slam of his look going all the way in.

The social-media world was ablaze with his daughter’s bagunça.

His flannel sleeve dangled into the flame. Pretty soon, I was on fire too.

Our father crumbled after her affair. We watched him for signs of cracking.

Maybe he was preparing for a disaster that would never happen.

I thought about the little graveyard where the man would be laid.

What right had Flora, of all people, to pronounce on what was strange?

When he bent close to her, his balaclava glowed silvery in the dying sunlight.

Was he a good man or a bad man? Was it necessary, even, to speculate?

I must tell you what it is like to be human, or you will drift away.

Her last relationship was with Elsa’s Instagram, truth be told. If Elsa is going to accept her follower invite, it needs to look believable. You did a bad thing, she thinks, and this is what you get.

“I wonder what will stay longer,” Frick said. “Me or that headstone.”

She’ll grow into a beauty, but she needn’t contend with that yet.

Thank goodness Dad died—sounds awful but he left his condo paid for.

That late afternoon in the park, with its kiss, wasn’t an ending or a beginning; it was both. The piano had been a great bird rustling and swooping in the vast space.

A plus B; a child in peril, plus love, dissolution of, equals a story.

“You look like you’re about to fall over,” he says. “Are you all right?”

I build our life together as I want it to be.

Evangeline thinks of the forged double-bit whistling through the air.

“What’s the shittiest thing you’ve ever done to someone?” she said.

Her biggest secret was Jay Currie—her white American boyfriend.

“If you love freedom so much, you shouldn’t think about going back.”

If you can be seen, you can be killed. No-man’s-land is everyman’s land.

He says to his boots, “Well, suppose we went for fish.”

My father would have ended my clandestine career on the spot.

Let’s put a frog in his bed and have him feel it jump all over him.

Youth! Goodness! Joy! Hope! Strange things to bring to a place like this.

“You’re going somewhere now,” he said. “Up to the big smoke.”

She possessed a quality that made one forget all shortcomings.

Gerard sat in the shadow, watching his son steal about like a thief.