Search the Archive

"Finally I came upon a pair of rooms missing entire walls, into which a little forest of underbrush and stunted trees had grown. I stood in the sudden breeze wondering what could possibly have done tha…"

"I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of those came as a terrible shock and, like anything else that changes you forever, split …"

"When I was fifteen, an extraordinary and terrible thing happened, and there was only Before and After."

"It was true of course, what my dad had said: I did worship my grandfather. There were things about him that I needed to be true, and his being an adulterer was not one of them. When I was a kid, Grand…"

"I'm no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I'm pretty sure that's flirting."

"I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was."

"It was one thing for a grandparent to withhold something from a grandchild, quite another for a father to keep it from his son—and for so long."

"Part of me felt like something momentous was about to happen. The other part of me expected to wake up at any moment, to come out of this fever dream or stress episode or whatever it was and wake up w…"

"Sometimes you just need to go through a door."

"A falling-down wreck on the edge of town, curtains permanently drawn, that would turn out to have been home to some ancient recluse who'd been surviving on ramen and toenail clippings since time immem…"

"I didn't know how to respond. How do you say I'm sorry your father didn't love you enough to your own dad? I couldn't, so instead, I just said goodnight and headed upstairs to bed."

"Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me."

"When someone won't let you in, eventually you stop knocking."

"Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time."