“Melting ice cream tubs, an empty carton of milk, candy wrappers and torn packets of snacks scattered like confetti”

“You were thinking egg the cop shop. I was thinking you slide over my belly, you slide onto my hand, take your sharp little breaths from my lips.”

“I wonder if the bursting of oneself into flames hurts just as much as being burned by someone else’s fire”

“…the cowboy looking down at his feet, lifting one boot at a time as if he can't believe he put the useless things on…”

“hazy memories of the funeral, the burial, and the aftermath”

“She sipped her steaming oolong tea as she watched Bobby ‘The Earthquake’ McGee”

“It was too late, they all said. We should start preparing, as if we had not spent the last four years sitting in the knowledge of our own mortality.”

“My aunt’s life was falling apart as I was struggling to rebuild my own, putting back the pieces in an effort to construct an identity separate from the illness.”

“I could never stand the sun because it always made people see stuff they couldn’t usually see.”

“The only thing worse than death would be the next family gathering.”

“His instincts were telling him to jump in his car and run, but he knew fleeing was not an option.”

“The thing about clowns? You never see them get back into the car.”

“She was sucking on her teeth and neglecting the ability to remember what skin was meant to feel like.”

“Petunia, like other scavengers, wasn’t afraid of a little biological warfare when her livelihood had been threatened.”

“…I would empty my pockets to him, loose change jangling like the chain around my throat.”

“Somewhere near the shallow end, she saw his Band-Aid float to the bottom.”

“She knew that one need not be deserving of cruelty to receive it.”

“peeling back the thick slab of skin and fat to reveal the red of her”

“I knew that the call was definitely not mine to make…”

“Liddy, you’re either going to be a scientist, a nurse, or a cold-blooded murderer.”