"Bella Altamirano entered the shop called El Descanso, owned by Rosa Quintero, her best friend. She greeted Rosa with a kiss that the shopkeeper returned automatically while wrapping up some herbs in newspaper and counting out the money a young girl was paying for them."
"I am staring out the window of my office and thinking about death when I remember the way Paiute smells in the early morning in the summer before the sun burns the dew off the fescue."
"It's our second day in New York City. We're with Dennis Lomack. Mom is in St. Vincent's, resting. She has recently done something very stupid and I'm the one who found her."
"It was a good thought for a Good War. I have to say: Once those wrinkly little bums in the L-Towers all over the world, our state ministers (stale ministers! Ho), did well their thing. Their thing was to govern with imagination at all times, and élan."
"It’s not true there were no casualties on the ground when the space shuttle fell apart over Texas. Some things happened that morning, some happened later."
"They pull up to the hospital in a red car, can’t tell the make or year. There’s something familiar in them, even after they step out. I’m behind the check-in desk as usual and can see them from the window."
"I never heard the siren. I slept through the rising wind and the tree branches wrenching loose and colliding with the roof."
"Renatino was surrounded by other kids, they'd singled him out for a while now in the jungle of bodies, but by the time he even noticed, four of them were standing around him. The gaze is territory, homeland—looking at someone amounts to entering his home uninvited. To stare at someone is a form of invasion. Not to look away is a manifestation of power."
"BUOYANCY What you have that makes you float. Does what the word sounds like it does with its B and its U bobbing up. Memories have buoyancy. They bob up to the surface like corks. "
"I’m sitting in the theater—dusty old seats, the smell of soggy popcorn, sticky soda, and cheap chocolate. The dust that has risen glitters and turns in the sputtering projector light. "
"This is what I know: She left last night. My mother, Billie Jean Fontaine, stood in our front hallway with a stale cigarette in one hand and her truck keys in the other."
"On Magdalena Mountain, at the base of certain boulders, the winter forage of little rock rabbits, called pikas, lies curing in the sun."
"It was squishy under my feet and at first I thought it was a wad of napkins. But as the crowds cleared, it became obvious. It looked just like me if I’d been made out of cornstalks and had button eyes."
"Jacky woke as the first tentative tendrils of light worked their way through the trees, clawing through the branches, pushing softly through the leaves. It was not the light that had woken him, rather it was a relentless gnawing hunger."
"Søren buttoned a gray shirt, stepped into a pair of dark green pants, and threaded a brown leather belt through the loops, his hands bright against the dark fabric. It was a cold morning; I didn’t know what time. I watched him for a long while before I said hi."
"For twenty years, Erma and Violet lived together in Glass, neither simply as friends nor precisely as lovers. If ever a question on the matter was raised, or if (more often) assumptions were made, they would share a glance, blushing, without a reply, not having a name for what they were to each other."
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