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“Mind you come straight home,” Mrs. Heywood always says.

No one is dead, but you should come back. See what’s become of us.

The first time we were alone, I knew it before he even told me.

I thought that proved he blamed me. I thought they all did.

What better place to write the great American novel than North Africa?

In Ovid’s tale, the virgin Philomela was raped by her brother-in-law.

I’m trying to manage my dumb-dumb time machine brain and be here.

She pulls quickly on her cigarette and blows it at me through the phone.

When I saw my father for the last time, we both did the same thing.

My father was at an awful disadvantage in a sport where cunning is a virtue.

Three lives I flicked alight with a few match scrapes. I cupped them.

What my father and I destroyed, I take back—kneeling, among the shells.

“were all here pregaming. at my dads apt. Wher the duck are u.”

No one answered. I turned to his parents. My stomach felt on fire.

That day he stood on some threshold and paused and wept at his choice.

There was a blue wool afghan draped across the back of the couch.

I am drawn to these victims because I was there the night they were killed.

He’s clear about his wishes: to die in this house, in his own bed.

You don’t feel anything when they cut you, not at first, just the blood.

I can’t see a way out of this. Things will not necessarily get better.

Each harbored a sense that a family of three was not a real family.

Here’s the part where you pledge devotion until death, I told myself.

He thinks with joy and conviction that the Japanese are his enemy.

“She was breakable, and I probably knew it from the start.”

“I know, I know, I shouldn’t have done it, but they had it coming.”

Every voice an epitaph, and then a little tune from the neighbor’s yard.

Darla has come to the monument to fight against her mind.

Lust was just a frenzy of activity that had mostly led Benny in circles.