Category: Read

“The memorial ground yawns outward through verdant overgrowth, a spiral of sepulchers and headstones that go on farther than she can see. In this town the dead outnumber the living three-to-one, four-to-one. Sally can’t begin to guess.”

“Eventually he stopped and stripped off his clothing and froze under the golden sky like some grieving angel.”

“On quiet days we’d wade through the streets like a dream of drowning.”

“His pill bottle bulged against his hip when he moved, and its quiet rattle routed his thoughts. He crossed the beach and sat near Annie, looking at her maybe too long. She looked back, arching a single eyebrow and saying nothing. She was wearing a knee-length denim skirt, a snug-fitting T-shirt with the NASA logo…

“The asphalt was hot beneath my feet, and I wondered if we weren’t placating forgotten gods left to dream and rot in the crumbling sewers and take some comfort in the holocaust above. The air this close to the flames was hot and acrid and Geneva couldn’t breathe without her oxygen. Her eyes watered at…

“I sighed and wandered over to the mirror, in which my reflection was a pale blotch in the gloom. I wondered how many people had stood at this very spot, their lovers sleeping, their hopes and vanities turning to vapor, dust, fingerprints smudged on the mirror-glass. What a terrible place for an epiphany.”

“But that was all Cassie ever did, just sit up here in her room and read and sleep, starve and wither, pass the years quietly, gently. There really had never been much else to her, at least nothing that Sally could remember. She wondered for a moment what Cassie thought about up here all by…

“A woman’s voice is audible far away. She’s singing opera but the sound is so warped and distorted by blocks of intervening architecture that the song has become plaintive and ghostly. This sound, the orange light, the long shadows, the smell of ash in the air – one finally has a brief glimpse of antiquity,…

“Right now this taxicab is the loneliest place in the world.”

“When I close my eyes the dream persists, so too the colors, the sounds, the feel of uneven pavement under my feet. There’s a warmth here, and I inhabit it as long as possible, staving off the black, crawling courtyards of unconsciousness.”