Stories

No one’s alone. Men kill for this, or for as much. And what of the dead?

Gary Sturm

Debra Hughes

These adventures taught me that writers are flawed human beings.

Those under us are not dead. They are dancers. We are the music.

Never mind the gossip of the world. Don’t have it, yet have it!

The three of us share a myth, that I’m fragile as old bones. My parents speak in low voices—about me, I’m pretty sure. I watch the waitress, trying to remember how to flirt. I take off my mask.

Her neck was wrapped in surgical tape, stained dark by blood.

He pushed aside a photograph of a man with a knife stuck in his eye.

He cut down on beer and moved into the hotel that had my name.

When I think on it, I can’t believe I’m going to kill two people over weed.

The golden-haired ones, they think they’re better than Virgin Mary.

We spread. Kneel. We’ll come out missing parts. This we know.

“Hey, you look lost,” the hunter had said. “You better come with me.”

The boys searched for their father, lost somewhere in the Olympic Range.

Literature lost its voice. Except on the page, it was silenced.

What I have learned as a farmer, I have learned also as a writer.

Some people see the man but not the light, the field but not the varnish.

One said she heard the jazz-band sob when the little dawn was grey.

I’m glad I shall only live in one century. Even if it’s the wrong one.

She wonders if he will be all right. She assumes he has four-wheel drive.

West Oakland was characterized by unemployment, poverty, and blight.

You never see Westerners, so you don’t think of them as human beings.

He didn’t mind, he insisted, that he loved her more than she loved him.

Somebody would be a lot happier if she were more like her mother.

Spanish men. They whispered and whistled. It made her jumpy.

Say what you will, a human being has the right to their own body.

We’d hit something in the dark which—bang!—was there and gone.