I better understood the little lies that liquor told, lifting spirits and drowning sorrows while withholding the whole truth–that, in the end, it is the spirit in peril of drowning. Sorrows have gills.

It was the kind of building that remembered things, deep-down things, things that rode tears into the world, telling them back to anyone old enough or wise enough to know how to listen with their...

Children see God every day; they just don’t call it that. It’s the summer sky painted with cumulus clouds by day and sequined with a million stars by night. It’s the sweet whispers of sweet...

It was words and reading that had made me quiet, and being quiet had made me a mark.

I don’t know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff...

I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.