“People drive by in their nice cars and stare because, like an accident, they realize it could happen to them. So for that brief moment, they can’t take their eyes away from that person’s tragedy because for that brief moment, they understand it could be them, and for that long moment it is them, and even when they are saying ‘poor bastard,’ they’re really thinking of the weight of their own potential loss.”
—Marie Clements. The Unnatural and Accidental Women: a play. (Talon Books, 2003).
“I was born with a fever, but it seemed to subside for sixteen years. High school, I was a good girl. I was pretty, I smiled, I fit in fine. And then as I turned sixteen and stopped smiling, the fever returned, though my skin stayed pale and sure, showing no sign of the heat inside me.”
—Rebecca Godfrey. The Torn Skirt: a novel. (Harper Collins, 2001).
“The summer I was eight years old, five hours disappeared from my life. I can’t explain. I remember this: first, sitting on the bench during my Little League team’s 7 P.M. game, and second, waking in the crawl space of my house near midnight. Whatever happened during that empty expanse of time remains a blur.”
—Scott Heim, Mysterious Skin: A novel. (Harper, 1995).
“When I thought about my childhood, one of the things I thought of was the measure of childish violence in it, and I’d always wanted to pick it out from the map of my early days. To know more about it, I reckoned, was to know more about the little difficulties of the past, not only my past, but the past of my family, and the past of those places where my family had settled. The dark tint we might have left behind in the city were with us all right in our new abode, they were more than with us, they were in us.”
—Andrew O’Hagan. The Missing: a literary meditation (New Press, 1995).
“Every new kid who showed up at the foster home had a few personal things that they were clinging on to. One boy used to have a little piece of felt that he would rub against his cheek. New kids always wanted to watch the TV shows they had watched at home. The change in TV shows made a lot of kids cry. When you are a kid, if you watch The Jeffersons with your family at seven o’clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting.”
—Heather O’Neill. Lullabies for Little Criminals: a novel. (Harper Collins, 2006).
”Some people left for the bar, while the rest of us finished the beers we’d brought to church. In the meantime, Anthony took off his artificial leg, and sat on a chair looking at it. It was a pretty grotesque-looking fake leg. A steel pipe, basically, with some plastic foam around it, shaped into the same contours as his real leg. The foam had been slashed several times, with blood-red paint covering the slashes, making the leg look like some kind of war casualty. At the bottom, just over the foot, was a baby doll’s head with grotesquely bloodshot eyes. Anthony said he’d seen children run from it, and I could see why. As he walked, the doll’s eyes would open and close, her wild hair flaring outwards from his shin.”
—Louis Rastelli. A Fine Ending: a novel. (Insomniac Press, 2007).
“Lucy drove fast, grim with the task of moving my body over one thousand miles, across the inland sea of parched grass and shimmering heat. But she looked smart, in an orange cotton shift with black marks like paw prints; it was Finnish. At night, she rinsed it out in a motel sink. By morning, it was dry as a bone and hung stiffly over her tanned & slender knees.”
—Camille Roy. Swarm. (Black Star, 1998).
“Isabel is standing beside Andrew’s crouched frame with her hand on his shoulder. They’re both looking at the exposed back and buttocks of the doll. Andrew waits for Isabel to pick it up. He doesn’t want to look at it anymore. The time he’s spent outside suddenly feels too long and dry. He wants his attention to be elsewhere, but he can’t look at Isabel. He doesn’t want to know what her face looks like right now, pointed downwards at the plastic body. Her palm presses his shoulder. He feels the heat and sweat of it through his shirt, mingling with his own until the shirt has soaked through and begun to spread and darken outwards from beneath Isabel’s hand.”
—Jenny Sampirisi. Is/Was: a novel. (Insomniac Press, 2008).
