Lie and say you have to pee. In his bathroom, check your purse for the condoms and then list, in alphabetical order, every kind of lie you can think of: barefaced lie, big lie, bullshit, fabrication, …

SAFE Employees make a SAFE railroad. With SAFE employees, a railroad devoid of any mechanical safety devices CAN and WILL be operated safely.

As they headed back into town in Smiley’s pickup, she could only feel like they had all done something wrong, something to be ashamed of. Something they could never talk about again.

As a witness should I run to her? Make sure she's not suffering a stroke or an aneurysm? I pictured a headline demanding the whereabouts of a witness who'd left the scene of a potential homicide.

Bars or no bars, if you did have something worth having, they’d take it, whether you were ridiculous about home security or not.

She understands the place she was born into is full of shadows. They slip into her open cracks, slide oozing into the gutters of her ribs, spill against the long, unbroken lines of her legs.

I'd never felt so sad engraving a trophy before, like I wanted to throw it away when I was done with it.

We think that Tinder is just for fun, swiping like in a videogame, like the 1980s game Frogger where the frog hops across the freeway and tries to avoid getting flattened by cars—this is how we …

He never finished a performance without making a prediction. His predictions, if right, would immediately boost his prestige and reverence so much so that when he passed his offering bowl around …

I learned to sleep as light as a new mother, in increments of minutes rather than hours, listening as I dreamed for a rustling of clothing, a knife unsheathed, and then I stopped sleeping altogether.

The job description was accurate: Assistant Needed for Commercial Body Modification Project was what it read, and Sherilyn was excellent at assisting, having done it most of her life.

Becoming seventeen years of age meant my daughter would be going out to the island that October. I didn’t want her to go. To me she appeared complete as she was. Also I had hoped, selfishly, that …

Bad things were happening, he had started to think, more than usual.

It was hot that summer, record highs through June, and Fiona, six, had taken to wearing the same pink and purple two-piece swimsuit every day so that she could spend as much time in the water as …

It is a quiet, banal word. Not one that I have ever thought twice about. Still, one afternoon in July 1983, when Colombo was burning, they say they heard the word cried out a thousand times, flung …

She put everyone on speakerphone because she couldn’t bear to have the voicemails that near her brain, where they might absorb and make her believe things from a person who disappeared like setting …

In an elevator there’s not much to do except be alive around each other. Most just look at their shoes, or their phones (we’d ditched ours for fear of tracking), or those glowing buttons.

The passage is smooth, but disorienting. She misses whole parts without knowing. She can’t tell what’s stitched together and what’s whole.

Creation is more than what comes from coitus, fertilization,and gametes. Color and shape have survived in the Cave of Altamira despite nature’s storms. Books never fade away. Michelangelo’s …

I wondered if this was something I could say to the other girls at the pool, who had decided that morning that I had a moustache, that my moustache needed a name, and that that name should be Pedro.