“My boyfriend shows up at my apartment with his face made up like a hideous monster. It’s not Halloween, but he’s an amateur actor, so I’m more surprised than shocked.”

“A week after Mom leaves, Dad tells us to stop asking about her. A postcard arrives. We recognize Mom’s handwriting. Dad snatches it away.”

“At thirteen, she’d stepped out of the forest into a place where the water was a solid sheet of green.  She was trusting then –innocent of what the color meant.”

“According to your back story, you have two sons. Kevin, who's eleven, right? And Keith who's fourteen. So it's Keith and his friend from next door. Uh..."Tadpole" is his name.”

“Every day, people came in and pawned a piece of their lives to keep living. Sometimes they bought it back. Sometimes they didn’t. But I always saw them again.”

“That’s when Nadine started to act as though she were built superior, even though she didn’t have the widest hips, hadn’t even shown that much before he was born, her stomach more of a suggestion than an assertion of pregnancy.”

“‘You don’t have to say anything.’ The blue heron is picking its way through the shallows, and they watch him finding his food. Charles said, ‘There was one time I had to kill a man with a knife.’”

“…you never see kids using food stamps? Are we not rich enough for you with our brown hands gripping colorful paper that is not quite money...”

“The closer you get, the more the emptiness emerges. What is keeping it all together? she wonders. And Who decides where it all goes? And What’s a girl gotta do to get off this shithole rock?”

“Nell gurgled around the thing in her mouth. ‘There’s nothing to fear,’ Dr. K said. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ Dr. K positioned the tool near Nell’s eye. It gleamed like a horrible tooth. One last time, Nell tried to speak, not with words but with movement.”

“So she tried to chalk the hairs up to the Philz Coffee barista that he raved about at the new location near his office. But Kristy couldn’t stop seeing Carrie Bradshaw as the barista.”

“At night, when she is sleeping in the bed beside me, I pretend to sleep. When she wakes, it takes her a while to realize her lips and nose are gone.”

“That’s the face of someone with a broken heart. One teenager peeks over her shoulder at the women behind her. But she can’t be heartbroken, the teenager says, pointing towards the stage. Look at the way she glows.”

“You decided at the age of nine when your mom left your dad in Chicago and moved back in with her parents in Hawaii, giving you a dozen chicks in his place, that if you couldn’t do this you had no business eating meat, or raising animals, and should probably leave the island altogether.”

“Sadie despised being alone, but she also despised most people, and thus led a life of conflict. When the pandemic came and everything locked down and locked out, this conflict bloomed.”

“ I do appreciate things that scare me a little, I suppose, though not necessarily reptiles. I wonder if that’s why I’m still seeing Lena and Janice, my long-time girlfriend who is also still married, though separated, doesn’t know about it.”

“‘Violet does not compliment my personality, we both know this,’ I say. Selina looks down at her nails on the counter, they are long and silver, obviously fake.”

“We didn’t always have to drive thirteen hours for a peach, but the third year After the People Disappeared, a brutal winter killed the peach trees in southern Michigan. This would be our last peach pilgrimage. “

“When I was twelve the dam broke. It had been built under the direction of William Mulholland. The morning of the flood, the dam keeper noticed a muddy leak and called Mulholland, who said not to worry.”

“All those years, my mother sighed in response. She was adding up all the extracurriculars she’d had to chauffeur me to in her head. The financial contribution that had made possible the tiny, toney liberal arts college where I majored in philosophy. All of it — wasted on a job that wouldn’t even cover my student loan payment.”