"...A voice in my head says: walk away, Bobby, just walk away. But I'm also thinking: what the fuck, take the money and run. Whatever the amount. Isn't that the reason I set out so early, why I walked all morning through dirty Moscow streets -- to make a quick sale?"...to get home, back to America."
"The gods had been sick for a long time. The people could not watch their gods being ill. They packed the few things they had left into bags and began to walk away."
"He says hair makes a woman beautiful. Any woman. They should wear it long, and please their men, tease their men, with the tickling of it across skin. He has no patience for short, manly styles."
Ed was chopping carrots and summer squash when Susan came home. She put on an apron and checked the open cookbooks to see what they were making. She took the package of chicken thighs from the refrigerator and started to rinse the pieces in the sink.
Carlos Bob lives and sleeps in the backmost room of the modular addition of a trailer in the Whispering Pines Trailer Court. He’s a confused boy, not only because of his name, some ethnic mismatch his mama dreamed up with her girls before she fell …
She's homeless. Probably crazy. She presses further into the only available seat four rows behind the driver; the other occupant presses closer to the window, stares out as if it was actually open and wafting clean air in.
He tried to figure out why they were putting him through this routine. Why else, if not to embarrass? He'd just have to show them that he could walk a line with the best.
A palm tree is a good listener.
It is not passion that tugs so fiercely on Rapunzel's upper lip, but another form of desire. As the prince approaches, Rapunzel steps back into the shadows.
Through the pine groves, past the mown corn, down to the river bank the children gathered every day after school, with sticks hoping to see the dog. The river bed was nearly dry in deep autumn, with the leaves almost fallen from the sparse trees …