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Sometimes in sunlight the scar shines, skin smooth and tight.

The sun falls back and vanishes like the men in my family who’ve died.

Peter Taylor’s stories are jigsaw puzzles of nuance and suggestion.

The road is covered with lake water that reaches Gloria’s calves.

A family altar stuffed with dead family hanging now above the TV.

I’m touched by kindness, I declare. That anyone wants me is a miracle.

You have to be three times better than the white kids, at everything.

I saw myself, and for the first time, I didn’t look away.

The sex in these fantasies was always a product of love.

Snow on blue roof tiles—sleeping village awakened by waves.

He’d reenlisted in ’64; he would not go home until the War was won.

Welcome, the place seemed to say, let’s screw with you a little more.

We have mysterious inclinations. No one can explain it to us.

The only person I’d seen naked was my mother the night she died.

I remember a child’s fingers on his wrist as they traced the blue.

Like a god I shook their tiny worlds, terrible but ineffectual storms.

She was the idiot who fell in love with some high-class gigolo.

Since the accident she lost her hold on the world and never got it back.

Grandma was forced to break her vow of silence only three times.

They come to America and their child is shot down like a wild animal.

You’ll find me here in the peach orchard, the most I can muster.

Now I’m no longer the buzzards glooming over the mango tree.

Hearing the baby’s cry, Varka finds the enemy who is crushing her heart.

In school, he was called gook, chink, and one boy called him ching-chong.

Teddy, the new sous chef, is on fire again. It’s the second time in a week. I make a silent promise to myself never to have sex on a beach, not even with Ryan Gosling.

I think you’re carrying on to get your brothers in trouble.

We’re all trying, in our own ways, to parse what we may have done wrong.

Books covered every available surface and much of the floor.

His thoughts swirl around him. Maybe women aren’t women anymore.

Mr. Holt had grown old since Beverly last saw him. He looked weary.