There is a crawl space in my lover’s house that his wife and children don’t know about. He likes to sing into it when he’s drunk and he’s only drunk when he’s with me.
Q-tips were her guilty pleasure. She loved the feel of them caressing her inner ear, reaching the itch she could otherwise not scratch. Even when there wasn’t a swish of water lodged within, she loved
She had us trade cardigans. She said it was an exercise in empathy.
I used to write in circles. Starting in the center.
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Apart from all these violent events, Raziel, De Kuff, and the other cult members have been moving between Jerusalem, Safed (site of the ancient
If you get this far, that means that things are all, more or less, going according to plan.
He was in love with his friend Faye, had known her since elementary school.
Despite your better judgement, you click on his profile and then on the most recent post: a picture of him smiling on a white slope with his arm wrapped around a remarkably average, yet still somehow traditionally hot (not pretty, just hot) snow bunny.
The story of religious mania and the story of political violence look very likely to converge on each other. Having consciously elected the first, Lucas keeps being drawn, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes unwittingly, toward the other. Both feature his new inamorata, Sonia Barnes.
swang
at night i sleep next to you, your skin balmy course. like grinded down sweetgum made smooth in the sweat of the mississippi delta summer. you tear and bend at my will. your spine disjoints
If Lucas is the most obvious Bob Stone avatar in Damascus Gate, Adam De Kuff might also be a contender, sharing with his author an improperly managed mental illness (it’s made very plain that De Kuff has stopped taking his prescribed bipolar meds a long while back)
Brian was psyched too. Not about her requests—Tom Waits was more his groove—but about where things seemed to be headed.
To be naked on the beach after a storm is something special—the salt and the petrichor and the hum of being unsettled that maybe the torrential rains caused damage, that maybe there were nearby ships that will never make it to harbor.
My Magic cards were the coolest thing about me.
Stone had two modes of handwriting: one a gnarly cursive he used to talk to himself and the other block capitals, more easily legible. On a scrap of torn paper in a crate of Damascus Gate research material is a draft of a self-mocking doggerel poem...
I could not imagine the dark well of her grief. I wanted to pretend it had nothing to do with me. But I felt compelled to bear witness somehow.
You would have believed on the screen was where my attention stayed.
