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Sometimes you weren’t a good daughter, the mother says.

With a world full of foolishly dangerous men, what’s a mother to do?

She’s coming back, her arms full of the flowers I gave her once a year.

The truth has always been thus and the response the same.

It’s a girls’ college we’re going to, but all the guys know Polly’s name.

How bright and eager they appear, how ready to get started.

Elinor had loved a man. The journey’s purpose was that she might forget.

Men can’t sense like that. Or won’t. Even a father don’t dare get that close.

It doesn’t matter who he is. I don’t think about him much anymore.

Sherman Alexie

Heaven preserve me from the Epidemic of a Proud Ignorance!

The horse is in the air, her legs withdrawn, a diamond shape.

I believe you get to see a sunset once. Death, well, I’ve lost count.

Grant had a lot of buttons on that coat—when he wore it.

What were the unsafe things to say even in a thirty-year marriage?

Someday you’ll understand, darling. Everyone will just—vanish!

My hands only knew. The painkillers in our mothers’ cabinets.

On a scale of 1 to 10, the pain dissolves like a Eucharist wafer.

The phone rang at an awkward hour, too late at night to be good news.

My mother was dead. Almost a month she was dead, killed by me.

A grin of bitterness swept thereby like an ominous bird a-wing.

The grass is defiant, wild, and reluctant to take any shape.

I want these things to have another life, like the old garden behind our house.

Dad was blind until six months ago, when he bumped his head in the fire.

Isn’t Nightshade sad, people said; isn’t he pathetic; isn’t he hideous.

Here’s the world, sweetheart. One word as small & large as a father.

I’ll leave a trail of crumbs as I descend into god knows where.

That summer we moved to the house you would die in years later.