The rest of the family joined in with stories mythologizing her wild and prickly nature. Even her maiden surname Liberty — anglicized from La Liberté — seemed mythic. When she was not much older than he was now she’d helped her mother cook for lumber camps where her father worked.

Icicles hang down from the gutters and the thin metallic railing that leads to the walk.  Tree branches bend under the weight of ice that encases them like a cast for a broken leg.  When April cries, Jen imagines curling up in André’s arms and looking up at his clear eyes.  His belief in his own promising future makes her believe something good can happen to her too.

I savored each bite of the pie.  Each forkful lingered in my mouth, against my teeth.  My tongue tasted the tangy lemony goodness.  This was the day, there was no getting around it.  If I didn’t complete my task tonight, there would be no more todays. 

Renata was assessing her schedule. She had only two more nights in Munich before returning to Riga. Would it be enough to go to bed with him? She wasn’t, in fact, desperate, but was worried that, if it didn’t happen, Andy would forget her immediately.

One day the grandmother said, “Kisszepseg, I have a yearning for a berry pie. I want you to go into the woods and pick berries for me. There is a bush full of berries near the giant fir tree that was split by lightning. You must bring me exactly one thousand berries, do you hear? One berry less and the pie is ruined.”

“…when we met, she once told me that she lived her days in English but all her dreams were in French. And what happened—” He paused as emotion unexpectedly clogged his throat. He coughed to push the words through. “What happened to her…she did not deserve…”

The dream started when a woman with a dog on a leash asked me what kind of fish I was fishing for. Not realizing I was fishing until just that moment, I looked down to find a reel attached to a long rod with the butt end in my hands.

Out of the corner of his eye, Max saw something move. His closet door was creeping open, the yawning mouth stretching wider and wider, until it ever so gently tapped up against the adjacent wall, and finally came to a stop.

He smells like menthol cigarettes and latex. When he pulls his arm back, she notices the plastic Batman bracelet on his wrist.

When he finished his sandwich, he took a cigarette out of the nearly empty box on his nightstand and lit it. He started wheezing as soon as he took the first puff, and it took awhile until he was able to stop coughing. When he looked up, he could have sworn that the spider was watching him again.