"This is not a story I’ve told before. No one would believe me. I mean, really believe me. They would get that look and nod. They would ask certain questions that suggested I was somehow culpable or that I was making most of it up out of nothing—just girlish fantasies and daydreams."
"After the End came the Beginning. And in the Beginning, there were eight of us, then nine—that was me—a number that would only decrease."
"It is widely known that Chopin died at two o'clock in the morning ("aux petites heures de la nuit," as French Wikipedia tells us) on October 17, 1849."
"Gina received a call from Adam, her only child, at 3 a.m., more than two months since she’d last heard from him."
"The bus to Kilburn is a long time coming, and while waiting Anna looks back and forth between two versions of the Edgware Road, the real and the digital."
"For the first time since you left the hostel, or rather since you left the advertising agency on the pretence of marriage, your heart beats calmly in your chest. After your period of troubles, events are finally conspiring for you and not against you."
"He’s against a wall, in the street. Standing there in suit and tie. He has ears that stick out, a frightened glance, short white hair. He’s thin, narrow shoulders. He’s holding out a magazine with the word AWAKE on it. The photo caption reads “Jehovah’s Witness—Los Angeles.” The picture dates from 1955. He looked like a little boy."
"Margaret didn’t like to make a fuss. But despite the number of blankets she’d wrapped around herself it was still bitterly cold."
"The story goes that my grandfather, Hector, married Winnie, an obeahman’s daughter. Grandpa Hector was a tailor, a quiet man who liked to smoke a little herb now and then down by the river. That’s what Gran-Win told me. She said nobody knew about Hector’s herb except she."
"This story starts when my parents drop me off at my uncle Jim’s house, on the way to the hospital where my little sister is about to be born. I am six years old."
"Kyunghwan and I met where the farm fields ended and our refugee village began. I waited until my little brother was asleep, until I could count seven seconds between his uneasy inhales. "
"I was a new immigrant, eager to shine, and if self-abuse were to be omitted from the reckoning, pure of body and heart."
"Ovid walks at twilight through dry rolling hills. A woman is before him, trailing her hands through the tall grasses which smoke wherever her languid touch falls, blackening and writhing and turning to ash. "
"Once I had a lover. None of us said boyfriend or girlfriend the way they do now, like children. We claimed our youth as a final stage, beyond it a void."
"Set in a verdant pouf of hillside, Leger shines pavlova white against the dirty, eucalyptus green."
"Neal Nathanson thought about drinking his own urine. Isn’t that what you do when you’re out of water? Wasn’t that what the Chilean soccer team did when they crashed into the Andes?"
Win "Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy" by Anne Boyd Rioux
