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This is the worst moment of her life, maybe of anybody’s life, ever.

“Make it look like you’re working on a nearby shelf,” Aunt Mary whispered.

Expulsion. He was out, his course set. One word can turn the key.

He’d been lost and tripping vividly on some speckled acid for days.

I try to get her to drink again. We were okay drunks, before Jesus.

The most arcane sexual practices could arouse me from my torpor.

He felt desperate for the rains, mosquitoes be damned.

Perhaps he was not almost sixteen years old, but thirty-five and sick.

Don’t hitchhike the Mediterranean coast of Algeria in the summer of ’71.

The clown has taken a seat at our veranda table in absolute silence.

Soledad is the name a woman is given, a sentence a woman must serve.

My father left me in the car while he was grabbing one for the road.

You might say I acted on instinct. All I wanted was to stop the screaming.

I looked up from the cave floor to see a guy pointing a handgun at us.

Maybe all of it was possible. Maybe it all could work out.

Long and black, almost thick, the night comes to drape my shoulders.

Turned out Bauer was one of the ones brought alive by misery.

Henry surprised himself with his inability to start looking for a job.

She had seen him take the crop to a girl for doing nothing at all.

For the first two months of class, Toby did barely any writing at all.

A man jostles my stride to the street, no shoulder on which to move.

Mark looked down at the fortune cookie as if it were a summons.

I want to dispute that depression is by definition pathological.

Both Sherlock Holmes and I had a weakness for the Turkish bath.

No one answered. I turned to his parents. My stomach felt on fire.

Gramps’ will was a fifty-year diary, all jammed onto two sheets.

He held a screwdriver to the fleshy underside of Peggy’s neck.

He was staring at his car like you might a stare at a dog.

“I might surprise you,” Mr. Maxi said. Polly hoped he’d go all out.