"This is what I want you to know," Sophia began. "I was able to love afterwards." She had seen him in the web after years, in the way that the web had connected everything now, so that there would never be any escape from the past again. She'd heard his voice once...
Skip called me yellow because I wouldn't strip in the field for him. He wanted me to. They all did. "You're nothing but yellow, aren't you?" "I'm not." "Are too." He chased me across the field and I was panting. Panting is what I did over "Lady Chatterley" all that...
Oskar had begun to change Michette, slowly, into a creature of his own design. The changes had been so subtle even she hadn't noticed her own greenness, her own virescent ripening like a sort of pungent fruit—red-green-gold in the afternoon light, translucent, and...
"As a body everyone is single, as a soul never." —Herman Hesse It begins with remembrance. A set of stairs. The scent of a crushed geranium leaf. A little balcony where two lovers once wrapped themselves. He was married. You were expecting me to tell you something...
(for Robert Buckley) My mother bought me that fox fur coat. How can I ever forget that night? The night I wore it and felt so much like an adult. I was nineteen. That night I went against her for the first time. I'm sure she was angry at me, but it wasn't really...
"Blot out the moon, Pull down the stars. Love in the dark, for we're for the dark So soon, so soon." — Jean Rhys I wasn't going to let her kill me. I wasn't going to let them kill me. The whole crushing force of the women who had come before me, who had lived before...
there is never going to be any peace for any individual upon this earth (or anywhere else they might escape to). all you can do is maybe grab ten lucky minutes here or maybe an hour there. —Charles Bukowski from "restless as the tarantula" Spend too much time hunting...
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. —Simone de Beauvior How many rooms are there in the chambers of your heart? How many rooms full of memories can you describe like the one I'm going to tell you about. You know how you left him don't you? The man you were...
"How I would like to believe in tenderness." —Sylvia Plath She begins in the house to move the flowers as if a rearrangement of them can restore order. It's just that there will never be order again, not really, she thinks. Ash rains down from the sky like...
The two women lay tranquilly on the wide sandy beach. They basked in the sun like the tiny lizards that slept aboard the rocks just inches from them. Cerise moved first; lazily rolling onto her back, then headed towards her beach chair. Miranda followed. "Isn't it...