When the first sentence hooks you in...

This was the time of day when I most wished I were able to sleep. High school.

Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.

"Wash and learn!" Sometimes a word or a phrase will take on a life of its own, achieving far more than was originally intended.

All this happened, more or less.

Seven hundred and thirty-three days after my mom died, forty five days after my dad eloped with a stranger he met on the Internet, thirty days after we up and moved to California, and only seven days after starting as a junior at a brand-new school where I know approximately no one, an email arrives.

Morris is suffering from that affliction known as teetotalism.

"Ezra nothing fits," Alani complained as she tried to squeeze her new ass into the old skirt she had pulled from her closet.

Blind people can hear and taste and smell what other people cannot, and what Ma Taffy smells on this early afternoon makes her sit up straight.

One day she stopped screaming.

Nobody came to my seventh birthday party.

On the twelfth night since my ex-husband escaped prison, I am in bed.

An English major walks into a bar...

I lost an arm on my last trip home.

It was the egret, flying out of the lemon grove, that started it.