He was almost twenty and Ree knew most girls would call him handsome or dreamy or some such. Sandy hair, blue eyes, put together strong, with bright teeth and one of those smiles.

The Dolly’s around here can’t be seen to coddle a snitch’s family — that’s the always been our way. We’re old blood, us people, and our ways was set firm long before hot shot baby...

The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can’t live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a...

Man, Sammy, I can’t live thinking that way””Well,I don’t think about it.

I, myself, often wished to be spared the expectation of better days ahead or such.

I had been born shoved to the margins of the world, sure, but I had volunteered for the pits.

This is how sudden things happened that haunted forever.

No god craves weaklings.

I slept for over a full day, as you know, but I won’t say I rested.

I FELL DEEP down in there, until this bright light raised me from sleep. Coming out of a pit such as that, you think the bright light could be God or a cop on patrol.

Ree Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. Carcasses hung pale of flesh with fatty gleam...

Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she’d...

Nobody cares for getting belittled by a person you’ve had sex with. A person you’ve licked all over. Nobody wants to sit there and get run down too far by somebody who gives them a...

I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different.

Moons of ache glowed in spaces of her meat and when she moved the moons banged together and stunned.