I Realized These Were All The Snapshots Which Our Children Would Look At Someday With Wonder, Thinking

The jury foreman's eyes twitch, then fall. "Guilty". Even before he says it, I feel departments in the office of my life start to close up shop; files are shredded, sensitivities are folded into neatly marked boxes, lights and alarms are switched off. As the husk of my body is guided from the court, I sense a single little man sat at the bottom of my soul. He hunches over a card table under a naked low-watt bulb, sipping flat beer from a plastic cup. I figure he must be the janitor. I figure he must be me.

'Vernon God Little' by DBC Pierre 

“I’d know you in the dark,” he said. “From a thousand miles away. There’s nothing you could become that I haven’t already fallen in love with.”

'Attachments' by Rainbow Rowell

Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them.

'Autobiography of a face' by Lucy Grealy

New York, 2022

Boy you really missed the boat. I'll make it simple, so's even fuckin you can understand. Papa God growed us up till we could wear long pants; then he licensed his name to dollar bills, left some car keys on the table, and got the fuck outta town". Water rushes to his eye-holes. "Don’t be lookin up at no sky for help. Look down here, at us twisted dreamers". He takes hold of my shoulders, spins me around, and punches me towards the mirror on the wall. "You're the God. Take responsibility. Exercise your power

'Vernon God Little' by DBC Pierre

When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you're born with, and eventually lose. Everyone under the age of seven is fluent in 'ifspeak'; go hang around with someone under three feet tall and you'll see. What if a giant funnelweb spider crawled out of that hole over your head and bit you on the neck? What if the only antidote for venom was locked up in a vault on the top of a mountain? What if you lived through the bite, but could only move your eyelids and blink the alphabet? It doesn't really matter how far you go; the point is that it's a world of possibility. Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

'My sister's Keeper' Jodi Picoult 

Everything in the world's got a voice; most people don't hear hard enough is all. Sunrise sounds like slow chords dripping from my guitar this morning. Sad chords, in B-flat.

'Chasing Charlie Duskin' by Cath Crowley

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink

'The Year of Wonders' by Geraldine Brooks 

First pages back for the forthcoming YA novel ...