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Grandma was forced to break her vow of silence only three times.

They come to America and their child is shot down like a wild animal.

You’ll find me here in the peach orchard, the most I can muster.

Hearing the baby’s cry, Varka finds the enemy who is crushing her heart.

In school, he was called gook, chink, and one boy called him ching-chong.

Teddy, the new sous chef, is on fire again. It’s the second time in a week. I make a silent promise to myself never to have sex on a beach, not even with Ryan Gosling.

I think you’re carrying on to get your brothers in trouble.

We’re all trying, in our own ways, to parse what we may have done wrong.

His thoughts swirl around him. Maybe women aren’t women anymore.

Mr. Holt had grown old since Beverly last saw him. He looked weary.

For eight weeks no one heard my voice for eight weeks no one slept.

This summer I mothered my brother’s death; I brothered my mother’s cancer. My brother and mother died this summer, two of seven billion.

When I wasn’t teaching social studies, I basically lived on my balcony.

Son, do you know of shame? Then you must know that I cannot feel it.

I couldn’t make sense of the ruined house, the love stained to its creases. Sometimes life is a sequence of departures, sometimes a destruction.

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

Here they were, two surviving soldiers from opposite sides.

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

It was half the Spanish he knew—stop, I have a shotgun.

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

Up there there’s not a sound except for the wind and the buzzing of bees.

If it were me, kid, I’d swallow. You bet I would. But first I’d run like hell.

My children, children, remember to let me go, delete my number.

In Ovid’s tale, the virgin Philomela was raped by her brother-in-law.

I grip the handlebar and pin my eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable crash.

From the roof, my husband observed daily a man and a woman having sex.

She pulls quickly on her cigarette and blows it at me through the phone.

Three lives I flicked alight with a few match scrapes. I cupped them.

A woman pushing a walker understands—gravel can be pain.