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Georgie is twelve and doesn't give a...

This is a work of fiction. This is not a work of fiction...

At the airport I have to make a phone call for someone to pick me up because my mother is at the hospital with my father, who has had a stroke...

When I told Daniel the lime margarita tasted like a menthol cigarette, he asked me what that even meant. "Astringent. Sharp. Antiseptic." ...

In a split second they become so obvious, the two things that I realize. The first is that I'm pregnant, the second is that I don't know how it happened...

Marty Kepler sat hunched over the table all afternoon. Like the rest of the furniture in his temporary home, the table was cheap, its chairs mismatched. He wondered what Fritjof would have made of it all, of him, working on one of his "sad little stories" in the dining room of the famous writer's childhood home...

I wanted to cook something simple and not necessarily typical of Colombian cuisine for the occasion: maybe pasta pomodoro or beef with asparagus. As soon as I heard my dad was being released from prison, I bought a ticket to Colombia and rented an apartment so we could spend some time together...

"It wasn't the mall," I hear Jessica say. "He left her at a Safeway. Tied up in the trunk of her car." ...

The first couple of days back on land after a voyage were always difficult for Viktor Krysanov. He had never suffered from seasickness, even when he was a student at the Marine Academy...

Brown. Everything brown. Brown is the weight and hue of this city...

When I saw him standing six-foot-six in the sun-light glare of the Texarkana Greyhound station, I thought, That must be how other people see me, so tall...

There are many things I do like. The way the light passes through our blinds in the summer in perfect slits. The way the light, like today, in the winter, pours through the folds of our heavy drapes...

Because you've made me watch The Godfather eighteen times but won't watch Gone with the Wind with me...

Lola, I called her. Her skin milky blue, her tiny fist curled around my hands. They let me hold her for a minute, let me bury my head into her yeasty body, still warm...

It was easier to get from one side of the day to the other, Erin had decided, if you gave it a colon, or specifically, something after the colon...

As boys, Charlie Coughlin and Mike Benton knelt beside parked c­ars on the neighborhood's street curbs to twist small caps, no bigger than a pinky finger, off of tire valves and pocket them...

His sister traced the first words of the Quran with her soft fingertip. The boy held the book while she held Manel, rocking the infant in her small arms...

A girl finds the ghosts of jellyfish on a street corner.

August and miserably hot. Unbearable, sweltering heat. The air's too thick to breathe, never mind prance around in a ratty wig and face paint...

It began snowing in the night. By morning twenty-eight inches had fallen, and it still snowed...

His decline is gradual, but a mother knows. Giant teddy bear hugs become limp, and the child turns his head, leaving a parent's kiss floundering fishlike in the air...

The line of wash crackles in the freezing salt wind. "Stiff as boards," Ma says as she unpins the ice-encrusted flannel shirts, letting them fall like planks of cedar into the old tin bath she uses as a laundry basket...

I loved your book, so romantic and tender. Bittersweet, I think that's the right word. It's plain as day you know desire...

I had to walk away. The stairs would only ever go up and up and up...

Kidnapping the old woman taught me far more than the respectable methods of Maximilian Delphinius Berlitz ever could. Kidnapping her goat was a boon I couldn't have foreseen...

Winter came late to Deep Meadow Bog the year Mr. Barnes took sick. December never really happened...

I know that they will appreciate seeing the hydrangeas in the window before they step through the door. I trim their stems over the kitchen sink and fluff their leaves out of the top of the vase...

Roots probes a husband's jealousy.

We were dressed to match the décor, pink peonies floating in glass bowls of water and gold glitter...