It is a truth universally acknowledged that going back on a proposal of marriage isn’t the best way to start the day.
It was not my fault. If only the group had followed my original itinerary without changing it hither, thither, and yon, this debacle would never have happened.
I am in a medical laboratory at the Central Intelligence Agency, waiting to pee in a cup. The sterility of the atmosphere here—everything is white—chills me to the bone. I am slightly humiliated by the prospect of a drug test, but I want this job badly enough that I’m willing to submit to it.
In the moments just before Kim Suozzi died of cancer at age 23, it fell to her boyfriend, Josh Schisler, to follow through with the plan to freeze her brain.
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
I survived the desperate toll dark depression takes.
I may not break even, but babe I’ll never break.
When you first disappeared, your mother warned me that finding out exactly what had happened to you would be worse than never knowing. We argued about this constantly because arguing was the only thing that held us together at the time.
I am running.
I am running through moonlit woods, with branches ripping at my clothes and my feet catching in the snow-bowed bracken.
Brambles slash at my hands. My breath tears in my throat. It hurts. Everything hurts.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past fifteen years, it’s this: that murder is really no big deal. It’s just a boundary, meaningless and arbitrary as all others—a line drawn in the dirt.
Going back to South Chicago has always felt to me like a return to death. The people I loved most, those fierce first attachments of childhood, had all died in this abandoned neighborhood on the city’s southeast edge.
Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-six years: with an idiot—in this case, my brother Shaun—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens.
I believe just about anyone can kill in the right circumstances, given enough motivation. The question is, am I there yet? I think I must be.
One day, my father walked into his Back Bay apartment to find a blond woman asleep on his couch. Nine months later, I appeared on his doorstep. One year later, my aunts succeeded in getting him committed to a psychiatric hospital.
The first thing you need to know is that drowning is usually a quiet thing.
I’ve hardly been outside my room in days
Cause I don’t feel that I deserve the sunshine’s rays.
It’s true: the war is rolling toward Berlin. What was yesterday a distant rumble has now become a constant roar.
They had endured years of waking up alone, making their kids breakfast, taking them to school and picking them up, fixing dinner and kissing them good night, promising that Daddy was thinking of them all the time.
Like a freeze-dried rose, you will never be,
What you were, what you were to me in memory.
My father took one hundred and thirty-two minutes to die. I counted.
If you want to feel bad about your looks, spend some time in Seoul.
Your father speaks of his youth with revelry. Spills his life across the table like an overturned drink, covering everything. Your mother doesn’t speak. Any stories of her premarital life come from your father’s mouth.
I’d always thought they would come for me at night, but it was the hottest part of the day when the six men rode onto the plain.
The kidnapper sounded polite, even deferential, when she called on a Tuesday afternoon last May.